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A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 




EDINBURGH, ADVOCATE'S CLOSE 



A LITERARY PILGRIM 

« 

IN ENGLAND 



BY 

EDWARD THOMAl 

AUTHOR OF "MAUniCE MARTnRLINCK " 



WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR 

AND 

TWELVE IN MONOTONE 



NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1917 






A ^ 



Printed in Great Britain 



Z^ls^-^ 



7 



ro 
C. AND F. HODSON 



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CONTENTS 

I'AGB 

LONDON AND THE HOME COUNTIES : 

William Blake - ----- 3 

Charles Lamb - - - - • i8 

Keats - - - - - - 3° 

Meredith - - - - - - 40 

THE THAMES : 

Shelley - - - - - - 55 

Matthew Arnold - - - - - 68 

William Morris - - - - - 82 

THE DOWNS AND THE SOUTH COAST: 

John Aubrey - - - - - 91 

Gilbert White - - - - 104 

William Cobbett - - - - ■ ^^7 
WiLLiAai Hazlitt - - - - -126 

Richard Jefferies - - - - - 134 

Thomas Hardy - - - - - 144 

Hilaire Belloc - - - - - 155 

THE WEST COUNTRY : 

HeRRICK ------ 163 

Coleridge - - - - - - ^75 

W. H. Hudson _ _ _ . - igo 

THE EAST COAST AND MIDLANDS : 

COWPER -._.-- 203 

George Crabbe - - - - - 212 

John Clare ------ 224 

Fitzgerald ----.- 236 



viii A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

PAGE 

THE EAST COAST AND MIDLANDS— confznued : 

George Borrow ----- 244 

Tennyson ------ 254 

Swinburne ------ 263 

THE NORTH: 

Wordsworth - - - - - 273 

Emily Bronte . _ _ - . 283 

SCOTLAND: 

Burns .__--- 291 

Scott _.--.- 298 

R. L. Stevenson - - - - - 3" 

Index ------- 319 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



IN COLOUR 
Edinburgh — Advocate's Close - - - Fvontispiese 

From the drawing by Walter Dexter, R.B.A. 

KACINC PAGE 

In the Temple Gardens — Fountain Court - - 24 

From the drawing by Nelson Dawson. 

Old Sarum, Salisbury Plain - - - - 192 

From the drawing by B. C. Gotch. 

Slaughden Quay - - - - -222 

From the drawing by Walter Dexter, R.B.A, 

Farlingay Hall- - - - - - 238 

From the drawing by Walter Dexter, R.B.A. 

Norwich from Mousehold Heath - - - 244 

From the drawing by Walter Dexter, R.B.A. 

The Moor, Haworth - - - - - 286 

From the drawing by Frank Southgate, R.B.A. 

Edinburgh — View from Calton Hill - - - 302 

From the drawing by Walter Dexter, R.B.A. 

IN MONOTONE 
The Zig Zags, Box Hill, Dorking - - - 42 

From a photograph by F. Frith and Co., Ltd. 

Shelley's House, Great Marlow _ _ _ 64' 

From the drawing by F. D. Bedford. 



X A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

FACING I'AGE 

Kelmscot Manor, William Morris's Home - - 84 

From a photograph by H. W. Taunt. 

Stones at Avebury - - - - - 98 

From a photograph by J. Valentine and Sons, Ltd. 

"The Wakes," Selborne - - - - no 

From a photograph by F. Frith and Co., Ltd, 

Savernake Forest — The Grand Avenue - - 138' 

From a photograph by Houghton Townley, Esq. 

Maiden Castle, Dorchester - - - - 152 

From a photograph by F. Frith and Co., Ltd. 

Coleridge's House, Nether Stowey - - - 182 

From a photograph by F. Frith and Co., Ltd. 

Cowper's House at Olney . _ _ _ 204' 

From an engraving by Goodall, after a drawing by W. Hasvey. 

Old Somersby Rectory - - - - - - 254 

From the drawing by W. E. F. Britten. 

Dove Cottage, Grasmere - - - - 278 

From a photograph by A. Pettitt. 

MOSSGIEL - - - - - - - 292 

From an engraving after the dn^wing by D. O. Hill. 



A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 



LONDON AND THE HOME COUNTIES 

BLAKE 
LAMB 
KEATS 
MEREDITH 



A LITERARY PILGRIM IN 
ENGLAND 

WILLIAM BLAKE 

BLAKE was born and bred in London, lived there 
for all but three years of his life, and died there. 
Nor can I discover that he ever went farther out of 
London, except on that one excursion to Felpham, than 
he could walk in a da}^ And he was not a walker. 
" He never took walks," says Gilchrist, " for walking's 
sake, or for pleasure ; and could not sympathize with 
those who did." Pictures, statues, and books seem to 
have had more reality for him than for any other man. 
Merely out of books and prints, and out of his strong 
feeling about "the Druid Temples which are the 
patriarchal pillars and oak groves," he could probably 
have drawn Stonehenge so as to impress us as we 
are ready to be impressed after hearing about it, yet 
seldom are. That was one of his principal gifts, to 
translate into visible and chiefly human forms what 
would in other minds remain vague, scattered notions 
and fragmentary blurred images. For example, at the 
beginning of the French Revolution he was a Re- 
publican, and wore a red cap in the streets of London, 
and in 1791 wrote the first book of a poem called "The 

3 



4 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

French Revolution." He paints the notables — the 
King, Necker, the Archbishop of Paris, Aumont, 
Bourbon, Orleans and a Duke of Burgundy, Mira- 
beau, and La Fayette. The Duke of Burgundy's 
portrait shows how readily and sublimely Blake's 
mind would work upon a hint. His materials were 
chiefly three : the grandeur of the idea in the title of 
Duke, the solid mass and dignity expressed in the 
sound of the word " Burgundy," and connected with 
this the thought of blood-red wine. Thus he created 
a Duke of Burgundy (the title was then extinct), a 
colossal Bacchic emanation from these three sources: 

" Then the ancientest peer, Duke of Burgundy, rose from the 

Monarch's right hand red as wines 
From his fountains ; an odour of war, Hke a ripe vineyard, rose 

from his garments. 
And the chamber became as a clouded sky ; o'er the Council he 

stretch' d his red limbs, 
Cloth'd in flames of crimson ; as a ripe vineyard stretches over 

sheaves of corn, 
The fierce Duke hung over the Council ; around him crowd, 

Vk'eeping in his burning robe, 
A bright cloud of infant souls : his words fall like purple autumn 

on the sheaves. . . ." 

It could hardly have mattered to such a man where 
he lived after his youth. Yet he gives as one reason 
for returning to London that he " ought not to be away 
from the opportunities London affords of seeing fine 
pictures, and the various improvements in works 
of art going on in London"; moreover, London, and 
in particular South London, suited him. Towards 
the end of his life he complained of Hampstead air, 
saying that it always had been bad for him : " When 
I was young, Hampstead, Highgate, Hornsey, Muswell 



WILLIAM BLAKE 5 

Hill, and even Islington, and all places north of 
London, always laid me up the day after." Accordingly, 
in London, and for much of the time near the river, 
he dwelt all his life, and avoided the northern heights. 
London was still a town, or not more than two towns, 
with country borders, when Blake was born in 1757, 
at 28, Broad Street, Golden Square. Gilchrist says 
that " as he grew older the lad became fond of roving 
out into the country. . . . On his own legs he could 
find a green field without exhaustion. . . . After 
Westminster Bridge — the 'superb and magnificent 
structure ' now defunct, then a new and admired one, — 
came St. George's Fields, open fields, and scene of 
* Wilkes and Liberty ' riots in Blake's boyhood ; next, 
the pretty village of Newington Butts . . . ; and then, 
unsophisticate green field and hedgerow. ... A mile 
or two further through the * large and pleasant village ' 
of Camberwell, with its grove (or avenue) and famed 
prospect, arose the sweet hill and dale and * sylvan 
wilds ' of rural Dulwich. . . ." The tree that he saw 
filled with angels was on Peckham Rye. *' Another 
time, one summer morn, he sees the hay-makers at 
work, and amid them angelic figures walking." Here, 
too, he must have found suitable dens and bowers for 
the wild beasts, virgins, shepherdesses, of his books. 
What he saw and read to any purpose made equal and 
similar impressions on him, and he combined the two 
with beautiful freedom. No wonder he declared after- 
wards that the whole business of man was in the arts 
— that the man or woman who was not poet, painter, 
musician, or architect, was not a Christian — that they 
must leave fathers and mothers and houses and lands 



6 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

if these stood in the way of Art. These free and 
astonishing remarks were written round his engraving 
of the Lacoon. Their meaning is not clear except to 
his peers, but certain it is that in Blake's view life 
should be a poem, a free and astonishing thing. The 
innocence of life he loved ; everything done and said 
at liberty from the mere reason or from the self- 
conscious, " self-righteous " virtues, as he considered 
them, of pagans, deists, and agnostics.. His own life 
and work proclaim his own enjoyment in a great 
measure of this innocence. 

He saw life whole. An unlearned man, who can 
only be understood completely by the very learned, 
he had made for himself out of the streets of London, 
the churches and shops, the fields of Dulwich, and out 
of ruminations among all sorts of books and pictures, 
a system of the world. The Bible, Shakespeare, Mil- 
ton, the mystics, newspaper reports of the American 
War and the French Revolution, popular songs, West- 
minster Abbey, pictures and sculptures and engravings, 
London streets, provided the elements of this world. 
He had no need of crying : 

" What do we here 
In this land of unbelief and fear ? 
The Land of Dreams is better far 
Above the light of the morning star." 

For this land and the Land of Dreams were one. 

Books were, if anything, stronger than direct sensuous 

experience, or he could not have mingled eyesight and 

memory of books about foreign lands as in "To the 

Evening Star ": 

*' Let th)' west wind sleep on 
The lake ; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes, 



WILLIAM BLAKE 7 

And wash the dusk with silver. Soon, full soon, 

Dost thou withdraw ; then the wolf rages wide, 

And the lion glares thro' the dim forest : 

The fleeces of our flocks are covered with 

Thy sacred dew : protect them with thine influence." 

He wrote of England as if her poets played on harps 
and wore "laurel wreaths against the sultry heat." He 
could write as beautifully by accepting the conven- 
tional idea, let us say, of a shepherd, as others by 
refusing it altogether. It would be impossible for him 
to think of a shepherd without thinking of Christ, so 
that he writes : 

" How sweet is the shepherd's sweet lot ! 
From the morn to the evening he strays ; 
He sliall follow his sheep all the day, 
And his tongue shall be filled with praise. 
For he hears the lamb's innocent call, 
And he hears the ewe's tender reply ; 
He is vt'atchful while they are in peace, 
For they know when their shepherd is nigh." 

It is doubtful whether three years by the sea added 

anj^thing to his geography. He had always that 

crystal cabinet and its world and " little lovely moony 

night ": 

"Another England there I saw. 
Another London with its Tower, 
Another Thames and other hills, 
And another pleasant Surrey bower." 

The only poems that might have sprung from the 
recollection of actual times and places are those in 
a small class of poems like the " Echoing Green,'* 
"Laughing Song," and "Nurse's Song." In all three 
there is an echo, and in two a most real sense of the 
last half-hour of child's play in the evening. Childhood, 



8 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

also, may perhaps have lent him the memory of a folk- 
song in the words of — 

" As I walk'd forth one May morning 
To see the fields so pleasant and so gay, . . ." 

and in the tone of " My Pretty Rose-Tree," which is 
like " The Seeds of Love ": 

" A flower was offer'd to me, 
Such a flower as May never bore ; 
But I said, ' I've a pretty rose-tree,' 
And I passed the sweet flower o'er. . . ." 

When he was only ten, Blake was put to a drawing- 
school in the Strand, and is said not long afterwards 
to have written the verses, " How sweet I roam'd 
from field to field." Out of school he used to frequent 
print-dealers' shops and picture sales. He was appren- 
ticed at fourteen to the engraver Basire, at 31, Great 
Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields. So he came to 
discover, what must have been a large part of London, 
of history, of the earth, to him, Westminster Abbey. 
For he was sent there and left alone to make drawings 
of the structure and monuments, Basire having to 
make engravings of them for Gough, the antiquary. 
He looked into the faces of the Kings and Queens of 
England and learnt history. In his old age he drew 
" visionary heads " of the Kings. 

Still living with his father in Broad Street, Blake 
began to engrave for publishers, and to meet fellow- 
artists, such as Stothard and Flaxman, By 1782 he 
was able to marry Catherine Boucher of Battersea — 
Battersea, " the pleasant village of the St. John's " — 
and take lodgings at 2^, Green Street, Leicester Square. 



WILLIAM BLAKE 9 

He used to go to Mrs. Mathevv's salons at 27, Rathbone 
Place, and meet the Bluestockings and their friends, 
and, as J. T. Smith said, read and sang several of his 
poems to airs of his own. His father died in 1784, and 
he moved to 27, Broad Street, and opened a shop with 
a partner as printseller and engraver, his favourite 
younger brother Robert living with him, his brother 
James keeping on the hosier's business at No. 28, next 
door. Robert died in 1787, and the poet and his wife 
moved to 28, Poland Street. There he published 
"Songs of Innocence" in 1789, having printed it in 
the manner revealed to him in a vision of the night by 
his brother Robert. " On his rising in the morning, 
Mrs. Blake went out with half a crown, all the money they 
had in the world, and of that laid out is. lod. on the 
simple materials necessary for setting in practice the 
new revelation," the reproduction in facsimile of the 
songs and their designs. The "Book of Thel" and 
the " Marriage of Heaven and Hell," reproduced in 
the same way, also came out of Poland Street. And 
there he wrote the " French Revolution," which was 
to have been published by John Johnson, and worked 
at designing and engraving plates for the same pub- 
lisher. Blake sometimes sat at Johnson's table at 
72, St. Paul's Churchyard, in a company that included, 
at one time or another, Priestley, Godwin, Holcroft, 
Tom Paine, Fuseli, and Mary Wollstonecraft. He was 
then, in Mr. John Sampson's opinion, writing some of 
the " Songs of Experience " and " A Song of Liberty." 
In 1793 he moved to 13, Hercules Buildings, in Lam- 
beth, a one-storied house, with " a narrow strip of real 
garden behind, wherein grew a fine vine." It was here 



10 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

that he produced the " Gates of Paradise," " America," 
"Visions of the Daughters of Albion," "Europe: 
a Prophecy," the " Book of Urizen," the " Song of 
Los," " Ahania," the " Four Zoas," and the plates for 
Stedman's ** Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition 
against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam," and for 
Young's " Night Thoughts." And here he saw the 
vision of the "Ancient of Days " and his one ghost : 

"When talking on the subject of ghosts, he was wont 
to say they did not appear much to imaginativeimen, but 
only to common minds, who did not see the finer spirits. 
Aghost was a thing seen by the gross bodily eye, a vision 
by the mental. ' Did you ever see a ghost ?' asked a 
friend. * Never but once,' was the reply. And it befel 
thus. Standing one evening at the garden-doorin Lam- 
beth, and chancing to look up, he saw a horrible grim 
figure, 'scaly, speckled, very awful,' stalking down- 
stairs towards him. More frightened than ever before or 
after, he took to his heels and ran out of the house." 

In September, 1800, Blake and his wife and sister 
were at Felpham, near Bognor, neighbours of William 
Hayley. Flaxman had introduced him to this man, 
Cowper's friend and biographer, and a poet whom 
people visiting Bognor went out of their way to see, " as 
if he had been a Wordsworth." Blake was to illustrate 
his ballads and the additional letters to his life of 
Cowper, and to engrave Maria Flaxman's designs for 
his " Triumphs of Temper." What is more important, 
Blake here conceived, and possibly wrote, his "Milton" 
and "Jerusalem," and certain shorter poems. He had 
at first high spirits at Felpham. Being now away from 
all his friends, he wrote a few letters ; but it would be 



WILLIAM BLAKE ii 

rash to conclude that he had not equally high spirits at 
Hercules Buildings, where he had no occasion to write 
long letters. ** Felpham," he said, " is a sweet place 
for study, because it is more spiritual than London. 
Heaven opens on all sides her golden gates; her 
windows are not obstructed by vapours ; voices of 
celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, and 
their forms more distinctly seen ; and my cottage is 
also a shadow of their houses." The hyperbolical next 
sentence where he speaks of his wife and sister bathing 
— *' Courting Neptune for an embrace " — should warn 
us that Blake sometimes used grand words loosely or 
lightly. Another letter shows how open he was to the 
suggestion of words like ** father" — he seems to take it 
almost as if it were "Our Father which art in heaven :" 
" The villagers of Felpham are not mere rustics ; 
they are polite and modest. Meat is cheaper than in 
London ; but the sweet air and the voices of winds, 
trees, and birds, and the odours of the happy ground, 
make it a dwelling for immortals. Work will go on 
here with God-speed. A roller and two harrows lie 
before my window. I met a plough on my first going 
out at my gate the first morning after my arrival, and 
the ploughboy said to the ploughman, * Father, the 
gate is open.' I have begun to work, and find that I 
can work with greater pleasure than ever." This was 
written soon after his arrival. On his first visit in 
Ai . -ust to look for a house he had been taken with the 
place, and sent an invitation to the Flaxmans : 

"Away to sweet Felpham, for Heaven is there ; 
The Ladder of Angels descends through the air ; 
On the turret its spiral does softly descend, 
Through the village then winds, at my cot it does end." 



12 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

He wrote other verses a few days after his arrival, 
on a vision by the sea, as he tells his patron, Mr. 
Butts, which showed him all he had ever known and 
left hirn as a child — verses " such as Felpham produces 
by me, though not such as she produces by her eldest 
son [Hayley]." A later poem, composed "while walk- 
ing from Felpham to Lavant to meet my sister," con- 
tains an interesting piece of introspection : 

" What to others a trifle appears 
Fills me full of smiles or tears, 
For double the vision my eyes do see, 
And a double vision is always with me. 
With my inward eye 'tis an old man grey, 
With my outward a thistle across the way." 

He strikes the thistle or *' the old man " on his path, 
and straightway he sees a sun spirit "outward a sun — 
inward, Los in his might," and he speaks: 

" This earth breeds not our happiness. 
Another sun feeds our life's streams ; 
We are not warmed with thy beams. 
Thou measurest not the time to me, 
Nor yet the space that I do see : 
My mind is not with thy light array'd ; 
Thy terrors shall not make me afraid." 

This agrees with his note to Wordsworth : "Natural 
objects always did and do weaken, deaden, and obliterate 
imagination in me !" and with his practice. " Through- 
out life, he was always, as Mrs. Blake truly described 
him, either reading, writing, or designing. For it was a 
tenet of his that the inner world is the all-important ; 
that each man has a world within greater than 
the external. Even while he engraved, he read, — as 
the plate-marks on his books testify. He never took 



WILLIAM BLAKE 13 

walks for mere walking's sake, or for pleasure ; and 
could not sympathize with those who did. During 
one period he, for two years together, never went out 
at all, except to the corner of the Court to fetch his 
porter," 

Mr. John Sampson finds that "Milton" "recounts in 
all their freshness Blake's first spiritual experiences 
at Felpham," that "the poem is indeed — a thing rare 
in Blake — redolent of the countryside and its new 
images, the plough and harrow, insect life, the scent 
of flowers, the song of birds, and the aspects of the 
sky, conceived in the same spirit of exaltation which 
characterizes the letters to Butts and Flaxman." But 
I have been less fortunate. There are two beautiful 
passages, " Thou hearest the Nightingale begin the 
Song of Spring," and " Thou perceivest the Flowers 
put forth their precious Odours," but for me they do 
not scent the poem, being in it, not of it. There is no 
more of Felpham in it than of Hyde Park and the 
Alms houses of Mile End and old Bow and Tyburn's 
awful brook. And then the harrow and " the servants 
of the Harrow!" It is another thing of the same 
name. It "cast thick flames." It never lay outside 
his door at Felpham. Luvah's bulls that " each morn- 
ing drag the sulphur Sun out of the Deep, Harnessed 
with starry harness black and shining, kept by black 
slaves. That work all night at the starry harness !" — 
these are magnificent, but not Sussex. As to the in- 
sect life, " the Grasshopper that sings and laughs and 
drinks. Winter comes : he folds his slender bones with- 
out a murmur " — he is exquisite, but could he not have 
come from anywhere except Felpham ? Could not "the 



14 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

Flea, Louse, Bug, the Tape- Worm, all the Armies ot 
Disease" who precede him and the slow Slug? Walk- 
ing in his cottage garden, Blake " beheld the Virgin 
Ololon, and address'd her as a daughter of Be ulah"; but 
I believe he might have beheld her at Hercules Build- 
ings or even at South Molton Street. For Blake gave 
up Felpham for London, having found Hayley intoler- 
able, and having been put out b}^ a trial for high 
treason at Chichester. He had beheld a soldier in his 
garden at Felpham and turned him out. The soldier 
retaliated by accusing him of uttering seditious and 
treasonable expressions. Blake was acquitted, but he 
left Felpham soon after, and Hayley, and Lord Egre- 
mont of Petworth, and Lord Bathurst of Lavant, and 
Mrs. Poole of Mid-Lavant; and early in 1804, took lodg- 
ings at 17, South Molton Street, where he dwelt nearly 
seventeen years. He was often "reduced so low as 
to be obliged to live on half a guinea a week," but he 
made the drawings for Blair's "Grave," and Phillips' 
" Pastorals," and the " Canterbury Pilgrims " ; he wrote 
and drew unceasingly. " Strange," says Gilchrist, 
" to think of Blake shut up in dingy, gardenless South 
Molton Street designing such pastorals ! His mind 
must have been impregnated with rural images, en- 
abling him without immediate reference to Nature 
to throw off these beautiful suggestions, so pastoral 
in feeling, of Arcadian shepherds and their flocks 
under the broad setting sun or tranquil moon." 
There have been stranger things. Thus Blake used 
to sit at night with John Varley the artist and astro- 
loger, and make pencil sketches of historical person- 
ages, kings, Wat Tyler, the man who built the 



WILLIAM BLAKE 15 

Pyramids, as he summoned them before him at mid- 
night or after in 1S19 or 1820. Varley was a new 
friend, met through John Linnell, one of the young 
artists who gathered round Blake, stored up his say- 
ings, bought his pictures, and assembled at his grave 
in 1827. 

In 1 82 1 he made his last move, to 3, Fountain Court, 
Strand. He designed the " Inventions to Job " there, 
being paid two or three pounds a week for them by 
Mr. Linnell while they were being done. One room 
sufficed for Blake and his wife to sleep in, cook and 
serve meals, and work ; another for receiving guests 
" There was an air of poverty as of an artisan's room ; 
but ever^^thing was clean and neat; nothing sordid." 
It had a " divine window " looking between walls on 
to the river. Blake himself got down first to light the 
fire and boil the kettle, and fetched his pint of porter 
from the public house at the corner of the Strand. His 
wife could cook. She could draw at times uncommonly 
like him. "When he, in his wild way, would tell his 
friends that King Alfred, or any great historical person- 
age, had sat to him, Mrs. Blake would look at her 
husband with an awestruck countenance, and then at 
his listener to confirm the fact." If his work was not 
going right, the two knelt down and prayed. In his 
last days, when she was nursing him, he suddenly said : 
** Stay ! Keep as you are ! You have been ever an 
angel to me. I will draw you !" Tatham said the 
drawing was " highly interesting, but not like." He 
went out very little, but occasionally on a Sunday up 
to Collins's Farm, North End, Hampstead, where 
Linnell lived. Mulread}^ and Varley and Samuel 



i6 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

Palmer also visited there. To the end he was work- 
ing hard. He was doing a series of drawings for 
Dante, and learning Italian too, and he took this work 
up to Hampstead with him. From time to time, to 
order, he executed fresh copies of the " Songs " or the 
" Ancient of Days." 

At the end of the period when there was a Merry 
England he was one of the best of Londoners. But it 
does not appear in his work, where he used " Primrose 
Hill and Saint John's Wood," ** Pancras and Kentish 
Town," " The Jew's Harp House and the Green Man," 
in some sense now hidden from us. He had perhaps 
seen their spirits, but had not been able to put them 
down in words as he had the tiger's and the lamb's. 
Even South Molton Street is but three words in his 
writing, and not a reality of any sort. Nobody as yet 
has discovered even what he meant by " Albion." The 
multitudes of London are represented in his poems 
practically by two suffering types. Everywhere he 
hears "the mind-forg'd manacles," but over all two 
voices, of the chimney-sweeper and the harlot : 

" How the chimney-sweeper's cry 

Every black'ning church appals, 
And the hapless soldier's sigh 

Runs in blood down palace walls. 
But most thro' midnight streets I hear 

How the youthful harlot's curse 
Blasts the new-born infant's tear, 

And blights with plagues the marriage hearse." 

" Songs of Innocence" include a picture of "children 
walking two and two, in red and blue and green . . . 
multitudes of lambs, thousands of little boys and girl- 
ings raising their innocent hands," in charge of "grey- 



WILLIAM BLAKE 17 

headed beadles, with wands as white as snow . . . wise 
guardians of the poor"; "Songs of Experience," a con- 
trary picture of " babes reduced to misery, fed with 
cold and usurious hand." His England, then, is just 
this: meadows and streets and cold churches, with 
children playing in twilight or weeping, lions and 
lambs mingled, birds singing, angels clustering in 
trees, venerable, seraphic old men pacing, harlots and 
soldiers plying, mighty figures descended from those 
in Westminster Abbey and the Italian churches and 
galleries, peopling the clouds and a misty mid-region 
of " Where ?" and Blake himself, a sturdy, half- 
Quakerish revolutionary, with rapt forehead carrying 
home his pint of porter. 



CHARLES LAMB 

LAMB was old-fashioned in nothing so much as in 
^ this : that he thought London a very good place 
to live in, and at the same time loved the country — in 
fact, loved both v^ithout giving either a cause for 
jealousy. When he was planning to live in King's 
Bench Walk in 1800 — as a matter of fact, he and his 
sister moved to 16, Mitre Court Buildings in the 
Temple in March, 1801 — he rhapsodized to Manning: 

" I shall be as airy, up four pair of stairs, as in the 
country, and in a garden in the midst of enchanting 
(more than Mahometan paradise) London, whose 
dirtiest drab-frequented alley, and her lowest-bowing 
tradesman, I would not exchange for Skiddaw, Hel- 
vellyn, James, Walter, and the parson into the bargain. 
O ! her lamps of a night ! her rich goldsmiths, print- 
shops, toyshops, mercers, hardware men, pastrycooks, 
St. Paul's Churchyard, the Strand, Exeter Change, 
Charing Cross, with the man upon a black horse ! 
These are thy gods, O London ! . . . All the streets 
and pavements are pure gold, I warrant you. At 
least, I know an alchemy that turns her mud into that 
metal — a mind that loves to be at home in crowds." 

At that moment he was suffering (cheerfully) under 
an egotistic letter from the Lake poets. Two years 
later, when he saw the mountains, spending three 

18 



CHARLES LAMB 19 

weeks with Coleridge at Keswick, he called them 
"glorious creatures, fine old fellows." He admired 
them, but it was not his native air. His father had 
been a Lincolnshire man, his mother a Hertfordshire 
woman. He himself was as much at home between 
the Temple and Ware as Wordsworth in the mountains, 
and less conscious of being so. 

Crown Office Row in the Temple was his birthplace, 
and, having passed the first seven years of his life there, 
he had such a liking for the Temple church, the halls, 
the gardens, the river, that when he came to write 
about them he declared he repeated no verses with 
kindlier emotion than Spenser's : 

" There when they came, whereas those brick}' towers, 
The which on Thames' broad aged back doth ride, 
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, 
There whilom went the Templar knights to bide, 
Till they decayed through pride." 

"The most elegant spot in the Metropolis," and 
doubly so to a poor boy whose first school looked into 
" a discoloured dingy garden in the passage leading 
from Fetter Lane into Bartlett's Buildings." There 
the boys sat wedged into uncomfortable sloping desks 
endeavouring after "a free hand," and writing out 
" Art improves Nature." When he left the Temple in 
his eighth year, in 1782, it was for Christ's Hospital. 

" In his yellow coats. 
Red leathern belt, and gown of russet blue," 

he became a travelled Londoner. Summer excursions 
to the New River near Newington, visits to the Tower, 
" where, by ancient privilege, we had free access to all 
the curiosities," and '* solemn processions through the 
City at Easter, with the Lord Mayor's largess of buns, 



20 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

wine, and a shilling" — these stirred up town and 
country for him for ever in a delicious mixture. Thus 
he was from time to time driven to break out on 
provocation from some extreme rustic, and cry up the 
streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, 
shops, shoppers, lights, coaches, bookstalls . . ., and 
exclaim : " O city abounding in whores, for these may 
Keswick and her giant brood go hang;" or again : " I 
was born, as 3'^ou have heard, in a crowd. This has 
begot in me an entire affection for that way of life, 
amounting to an almost insurmountable aversion from 
solitude and rural scenes." He could even in a way 
enjoy, from the very intensity of its significance, the 
" delicate suburban " home of Sir Jeffery Dunstan, 
where the atmosphere was made up of **a strong odour 
of burnt bones . . . blended with the scent of horse- 
flesh seething into dog's meat, and only relieved a 
little by the breathings of a few brick-kilns." His 
country scenes have a peculiar brightness of grass 
and water, as if he had emerged out upon them from 
the dark Temple or the "delicate suburban" wilderness. 
In his longer holidays he got out far beyond Newington, 
to Blakesware, between Widford and Ware in Hert- 
fordshire. His grandmother had been housekeeper 
for half a century in the old house. Widford Church is 
the church of the poem, where ** the grandame sleeps " : 

" On the green liill-top. 
Hard by the house of prayer, a modest roof, 
And not distinguished from its neighbour barn 
Save by a slender tapering length of spire." 

She died in 1792, but Lamb revisited the place from 
time to time. As early as 1799 he writes to Southey 



CHARLES LAMB 21 

of " an old house with a tapestry bedroom, the ' Judg- 
ment of Solomon ' composing one panel, and ' Actaeon 
spying Diana naked ' the other ... an old marble 
hall, with Hogarth's prints and the Roman Cse-sars 
in marble hung round ... of « wilderness, and of a 
village church, and where the bones of my honoured 
grandam lie." But, he adds, " these are feelings which 
refuse to be translated, sulky aborigines, which will 
not be naturalized in another soil." Thirty years 
later he wished he were buried "in the peopled 
solitude " of such a house, " with my feelings at seven 
years old." Nothing, he said, " fills a child's mind like 
a large old mansion ; better if un- or partially occu- 
pied." The marble hall, the twelve Caesars, the 
Hogarths, the family portraits, the tapestry hangings 
" full of Bible history," appear in Margaret Green's 
story of ''The Young Mahometan" in "Mrs. Leicester's 
School " ; the garden south wall (" can I forget the hot 
feel of the brickwork ?") in the letter on " The Last 
Peach." House and gardens reappear in the essay on 

" Blakesmoor in H shire." 

He had other connexions with Hertfordshire, near 
Wheathampstead. "The oldest things I remember," 
he wrote in one of his best-known essays, " is Mackery 
End ; or Mackaree End, as it is spelt, perhaps more 
properl}^, in some old maps of Hertfordshire ; a farm- 
house, delightfully situated within a gentle walk from 
Wheathampstead." He recalled going there with Mary 
to see a great-aunt, a sister of his grandmother's. They 
were Brutons, but the grandmother at Blakesware 
married a Field, the great-aunt a Gladman. A Bruton, 
says Mr. E. V. Lucas, still lived at Wheathampstead in 



22 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

1904. The letter already quoted, speaking of an 
"aversion" from the country, admits that it was sus- 
pended in his younger days " during a period in which 
I had set my affections upon a charming young woman. " 

This was presumably the "Alice W n " of the essays ; 

the Anna of the early sonnets, who made him declare 
himself 

" well content to play 
With thy free tresses all a summer's day, 
Losing the time beneath the greenwood shade." 

She must have helped hira to the " truant love of 
rambling" which made this sonnet (of 1795) : 

" The Lord of Light shakes off his drowsyhed ; 

Fresh from his couch up springs the lusty sun, 
. And girds himself his mighty race to run. 
Meantime, by truant love of rambling led, 
I turn my back on thy detested walls, 
Proud city, and thy sons I leave behind, 
A selfish, sordid, money-getting kind 
Who shut their ears when holy freedom calls. 
I pass not thee so lightly, humble spire, 
That mindest me of many a pleasure gone, 
Of merriest days of love and Islington, 
Kindling anew the flames of past desire ; 
And I shall muse on thee, slow journeying on, 
To the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire." 

Alice was Ann Simmons, a girl he had met at 
Blakesware. 

1795 was the fourth year of Lamb's service with 
the East India Company; the year v/hen the family 
moved from the Temple to 7, Little Queen Street, 
Holborn ; the year when Coleridge left Cambridge ; 
and the last or one of the last when he and Lamb 
supped and talked at the Salutation and Cat near 
SmithfieJd. In 1796 Mary Lamb was the death of her 



CHARLES LAMB 23 

mother; the father died soon after, and the aunt 
Hetty followed. Lamb and his sister were left alone 
together at Little Queen Street. For a short time they 
were at 45, Chapel Street, Pentonville, At Pentonville 
he used to see the Quaker Hester. Then the brother 
and sister moved to 34, Southampton Buildings. For 
nine years from 1801 they lived at 16, Mitre Court 
Buildings. Now, in 1802 he was writing "The 
Londoner " and private letters which show with what 
a zest he was tasting London. He transcribes " The 
Londoner " in a letter to Manning : 

" Every man," he says, ** while the passion is upon 
him, is for a time at least addicted to groves and 
meadows and purling streams. During this short 
period of my existence, I contracted just enough 
familiarity with rural objects to understand tolerably 
well after the Poets, when they declaim in such 
passionate terms in favour of a country life. 

" For my own part, now the fit is long past, I have 
no hesitation in declaring that a m.ob of happy faces 
crowding up at the pit door of Drury Lane Theatre 
just at the hour of five give me ten thousand finer 
pleasures than I ever received from all the flocks of 
silly sheep that have whitened the plains of Arcadia or 
Epsom Downs. 

" This passion for crowds is nowhere feasted so full 
as in London. The man must have a rare recipe for 
melancholy who can be dull in Fleet Street. . . ." 

But apart from the crowd, Lamb had the advantage 
of more select company — Wordsworth, Coleridge, 
Hazlitt, and others — on Wednesday evenings. The 
'* passion " was not upset — it may have been sustained 



24 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

— by occasional holidays in Hertfordshire, at Oxford, 
or Cambridge, or Brighton, in the Lakes, or with 
Hazlitt at Winterslow. Mary could walk fifteen miles 
a day in 1817, and at this rate she and her brother must 
have explored far round Brighton. 

In 1809, after a brief interval at 34, Southampton 
Buildings, Chancery Lane, the Lambs entered 4, Inner 
Temple Lane. When they left in 181 7, they had been 
seventeen years in the Temple. They were now in 
Russell Street — the part then known as Great Russell 
Street, between Covent Garden and Catherine Street 
— "at the corner of Bow Street, and the site where 
Will's Coffee House once stood." They had been trans- 
planted from " our native soil," said Lamb to Dorothy 
Wordsworth, but to " the individual spot I like best in 
all this great city," on account of the theatres and 
Covent Garden, " dearer to me than any gardens of 
Alcinous, where we are morally certain of the earliest 
peas and 'sparagus." Mary calls it a cheerful place, 
and quite enjoys " the calling up of the carriages and 
the squabbles of the coachmen and little boys " in 
November; but new chairs and carpets and the absence 
of the Hogarths (now all bound in a book) from the wall 
cause her misgivings. Lamb dates his next letter from 
" The Garden of England " : a few weeks later he was 
for examining the bumps of the Comptroller of Stamps 
at Haydon's dinner-party, if Keats and the host had 
not hurried him away. 

In May, 18 19, Lamb Viras writing to Manning, then 
at Totteridge in Hertfordshire, to inquire after his 
cousins, "the Gladman's of Wheathampstead, and 
farmer Bruton." Probably he was then fresh from 







'"--i-atesv_. 



;j . .«■;,-< v>.''l»--'.'«*tH# 



J 



IN THE TEINIPLK GARDENS (FOUNTAIN COURT) 



CHARLES LAMB 25 

revisiting them, and about to write his essay on 
" Mackery End in Hertfordshire." He was comparing 
the dead wood of his desk unfavourably with the living 
trees of Hertfordshire. Of one thing at least he was 
tired in London, and that was the India House. 

Already for some years he and his sister had begun 
to slip away at times to " a rural lodging at Dalston," 
14, Kingsland Row, "to divide their time, in alternate 
weeks, between quiet rest and dear London weariness." 
There Lamb could take a seventeen-mile walk in fields, 
and could write without fear of interruption ; but 
presently he resolved to move entirely out on to the 
country margin of London. He took a cottage at 
Colebrook Row, Islington, in 1823: 

" A cottage, for it is detach'd ; a white house, with 
six good rooms. The New River (rather elderly by 
this time) runs (if a moderate walking pace can be so 
termed) close to the foot of the house ; and behind is 
a spacious garden, with vines (I assure you), pears, 
strawberries, parsnips, leeks, carrots, cabbages, to 
delight the heart of old Alcinous. You enter without 
passage into a cheerful dining-room, all studded over 
and rough with old books, and above is a lightsome 
drawing-room, three windows, full of choice prints. I 
feel like a great lord, never having had a house before." 

The London Magazine, he fears, is failing off, but he 
has pears to gather and a vine to sit under. It was at 
the end of this autumn that George Dyer, "staff in 
hand, in broad open day, marched into the New River," 
and suggested the essay "Amicus Redivivus," and 
the rebuke to that mockery of a river. Lamb had 
known the New River high up at Ware and low down 



26 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

at Newington. That the poet had to be rescued by 
ordinary means proved, however, that the river was 
no true river, with "no swans, no naiads, no river- 
god." A year and a half later, in March, 1825, he left 
this note for Henry Crabb Robinson : 

'* I have left the d d India House for ever ! Give 

me great joy. — C. Lamb." 

He walked twenty miles one day ; next day wrote to 
Wordsworth and Bernard Barton. They were four 
years at Islington. " My house-deaths," wrote Lamb 
to Hood, "have generally been periodical, recurring 
after seven years, but this last is premature by half 
that time." Life at Islington had not agreed with him, 
even mitigated by daily work at the British Museum ; 
so he took a step which brought him halfway to Ware 
and Blakesware — i.e., to Enfield — yet not so far but that 
he could " occasionally breathe the fresher air of the 
Metropolis." He could still say — to Wordsworth that is : 

" O let no native Londoner imagine that health, rest, 
and innocent occupation, interchange of converse sweet, 
and recreative study, can make the country anything 
better than altogether odious and detestable. A garden 
was the primitive prison till man with promethean 
felicity and boldness luckily sinn'd himself out of it. 
Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, London, 
haberdashers, goldsmiths, taverns, playhouses, satires, 
epigrams, puns — these all came in on the town part, 
and the thither side of innocence." 

To Bernard Barton he could say he dreaded Summer 
with his long days. " No need of his assistance to 
make country places dull. With fire and candle light 
I can dream myself in Holborn. With lightsome skies 



CHARLES LAMB 27 

shining in to bedtime, I cannot. ..." But London 
was not what it was. Friends had gone ; clubs had 
crumbled away. Even more than at Enfield he could 
be lonely in London, after seeing off Emma Isola, " our 
adopted young friend," at the end of the holidays. And 
there was that " dear London weariness." 

Much of his country lives now only in his letters, 
particularly in one to Charles Cowden Clarke written 
in December, 1828 : 

" The way from Southgate to Colney Hatch through 
the unfrequentedest blackberry paths that ever con- 
cealed their coy branches from a truant citizen we have 
accidentally fallen upon. The giant tree by Cheshunt 
[Gofif's Oak] we have missed, but keep your chart to go 
by, unless you will be our conduct. At present I am 
disabled from further flights than just to skirt round 
Clay Hill, with a peep at the fine back-woods, by 
strained tendons, got by skipping a skipping-rope at 
fifty-three — heu mihi non sum qualis. But do you know, 
now you come to talk of walks, a ramble of four hours 
or so, there and back, to the willow and lavender plan- 
tations at the south corner of Northaw Church by a 
well dedicated to St. Claridge, with the clumps of finest 
moss rising hillock fashion, which I counted to the 
number of two hundred and sixty, and are called 
* Claridge's covers,' the tradition being that that saint 
entertained so manj^ angels or hermits there, upon 
occasion of blessing the waters ? . . . A sweeter spot 
is not in ten counties round. You are knee-deep in 
clover — that is to say, if you are not above a middling 
man's height. From this paradise, making a day of it, 
you go to see the ruins of an old convent at March 
Hall, where some of the painted glass is yet whole and 
fresh. . . . 



28 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

" I shall long to show you the ' clump meadows,' as 
they are called ; we might do that, without reaching 
March Hall. When the days are longer, we might take 
both, and come home by Forest Cross. So skirt we 
Pennington, and the cheerful little village of Churchley, 
to Forty Hill. . . ." 

He put some of this country into the sonnet on his 
walks with Mary Lamb and Emma Isola : 

" By Enfield lanes and Winchmore's verdant hill. . . ." 

But his sister was too often and too long absent, ill ; 
and soon, in 1829, they gave up their house and moved 
into lodgings next door, at the house now known as 
Westwood Cottage, in Enfield Chase Side. From here 
he wrote the letter to Wordsworth on man's " pro- 
methean felicity" in sinning himself out of gardens 
and the country. He could no longer have written that 
letter on " Mrs. Gilpin riding to Edmonton," Mrs. 
Gilpin having climbed up on to the top of one of " the 
high awkward styles " of Edmonton. But to Edmonton 
they went in 1833, Mary to a private asylum. Lamb to 
rooms in the same house, in Church Street. He was 
now " three or four miles nearer the Great City, coaches 
half-price less, and going always, of which I will avail 
myself." Sixteen miles a day was still not too much 
for him : he could not read much in summer-time. 
Emma Isola was getting married to Edward Moxon. 
He dined with an old school friend "at Johnny 
Gilpin's " — ?>., at The Bell at Edmonton — and " talked 
of what old friends were taken or left in the thirty 
years since we had met." In his writing he had always 
looked back too much, but in these last years it was no 



CHARLES LAMB 29 

literary artifice. At long intervals he struggled to 
London. Mary, when she was well, walked " always 
up the road, dear Londonwards." Coleridge died, and 
then Lamb died, five months later, in December, 1834, 
at Church Street, Edmonton. He was a good Londoner, 
but a good Hertfordshireman too, a lover of pure, 
gentle country — cornland, copse, and water — and of 
gardens refined out of it. What he saw he put down 
almost exactly, a little enriched, perhaps, certainly a 
great deal touched by the pathetic that comes of look- 
ing backward, and never more so than when he wrote 
of the country, because he had never known it except 
as a place deliberately resorted to for rest and change 
of air, since he was a child at Newington, at Blakes- 
ware, near Widford, at Mackery End, near Wheat- 
hampstead. 



KEATS 

KEATS lived the greater part of his life in London 
and in the country on London's northern borders. 
His father was a West-Country man; where his mother 
came from, whose maiden name was Jennings, is un- 
known and unconjectured. The poet, their eldest son, 
was born at a livery stable in Finsbury Pavement. 
When he was nine or ten he went to live at Church 
Street, Edmonton, at the house of his mother's mother. 
His schooldays were passed at Enfield, under the 
father of his friend, Charles Cowden Clarke. Leaving 
school on his mother's death, he went, when he was 
fifteen, as apprentice to a surgeon at Edmonton. There 
he began to read Spenser and write verses. A quarrel 
caused him to quit the surgeon and study at St. 
Thomas's and Guy's Hospitals ; and he divided the 
next three years of his life, 1814 to 1817, between 
lodgings at 8, Dean Street, Borough, in St. Thomas's 
Street, in the Poultry, and at ^6, Cheapside, sometimes 
alone, sometimes with other students or with his two 
younger brothers. 

In 1 8 16 Keats had an August holiday at Margate. 
Otherwise these twenty-two years seem to have been 
spent in the middle of a city or in the gentle garden 
country adjacent. 

The city, unless by provocation, gave him no im- 

30 



KEATS 31 

pulse to writing. When he was just twenty he said, 
in the epistle to George Felton Mathew, that he was 
beckoned away by his work from poetry, and that, 
even if he could give all his time to the " coy muse," 

" with me she would not live 
In this dark city, nor would condescend 
'Mid contradictions her delights to lend." 

Nevertheless, with poetry and his friends he was 
very happily alive. It was at his lodgings in the 
Borough, after a night with his friend Clarke at 
Clerkenwell, that he wrote the sonnet " On First 
Looking into Chapman's Homer." Other poems and 
letters record his enjoyment of the talk, the reading, 
the music, the card-playing, that filled long nights 
with his friends. He writes while 

" lovely airs 
Are fluttering round the room like doves in pairs," 

or while his solitude is still thrilled by memories. On 
his way homeward, probably from Leigh Hunt's in the 
Vale of Health, he composed the sonnet : 

" Keen fitful gusts are whispering here and there 

Among the bushes, half leafless and dry ; 

The stars look very cold about the sky, 
And I have many miles on foot to fare ; 
Yet feel I little of the cold bleak air, 

Or of the dead leaves rustUng drearily, 

Or of those silver lamps that burn on high, 
Or of the distance from home's pleasant lair : 
For I am brim full of the friendliness 

That in a little cottage I have found ; 
Of fair-haired Milton's eloquent distress, 

And all his love for gentle Lycid' drown'd ; 
Of lovely Laura in her light green dress. 

And faithful Petrarch gloriously crown'd." 



32 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

Verses were, in fact, his compliments to the pleasures 
of life. He stuffed them with what had just come to 
his eye or to his mind. From Margate, for example, 
he wrote to his brother George : 

"These things I thought 
While, in my face, the freshest breeze I caught. 
E'en now I am pillow'd on a bed of flowers 
That crowns a lofty cHff, which proudly towers 
Above the ocean waves. The stalks and blades 
Chequer my tablet with their quivering shades. 
On one side is a field of drooping oats. 
Through which the poppies show their scarlet coats." 

Dwelling so much in a country of small fields and 
many gardens, and among artistic town-dwellers like 
Leigh Hunt, who regarded the country as a picture- 
gallery and pleasure-resort, Keats began by rhyming 
pretty catalogues of the pretty things in Nature. 
Seldom does he approach or aim at a picture even as 
complete and proportioned as that just quoted; a score 
or so of tiny details, each separate and self-sufficient, 
can do nothing to remind us of the actual scenery from 
whose myriad elements these were chosen. How little 
Keats cared so long as nothing ugly or mean entered 
the catalogue is shown by his picture of the " flowery 
spot" where he thinks the "co}^ muse" might con- 
descend to him. He mingles Druid oaks, laburnum, 
and cassia, adding nightingales and "a ruin dark and 
gloomy." 

In April, 1817, when he had given up the hospitals 
and published his first book of poems, Keats took the 
coach to Southampton and crossed to the Isle of 
Wight. He all but filled the letter written to his 
brother from Southampton with a list of things seen 



KEATS 33 

by the way. The island, St. Catherine's Hill, Shanklin 
Chine, the white cliffs, Carisbrooke Castle, the copses, 
the primroses and cowslips, and the sea, delighted him ; 
he stopped at "Mrs. Cook's, New Village, Caris- 
brooke " ; he wrote the sonnet " On the Sea," 

" It keeps eternal whisperings around 
Desolate shores," 

and he began "Endymion"; then fled from solitude 
and unwholesome food, and a nervous poetic mood, 
" a continual burning of thought," which made sleep 
almost impossible. Margate, in spite of its lack of 
trees, attracted him. Having his younger brother for 
company, he went on with " Endymion," borrowing 
from his surroundings, perhaps, such things as the 
comparison of the shouts of Pan's worshippers to 

" dying rolls 
Of abrupt thunder, when Ionian shoals 
Of dolphins bob their noses through the brine." 

The two moved on together to Canterbury, and after- 
wards to lodgings, which the three brothers shared, at 
Well Walk, Hampstead. Here Keats was writing the 
second book of " Endymion." Walking on the heath 
in the summer of 1817, he repeated selections from it to 
his friends. The third book was the task of a holiday 
at Oxford, where he was the guest of an undergraduate 
at Magdalen Hall, Benjamin Bailey. It was September, 
and the friends boated on the Isis and read Words- 
worth among the rushes, or sat up over "The Matchless 
Orinda " or Hazlitt's " Round Table," or took a trip to 
Stratford-on-Avon. Keats wrote 1,000 lines in three 
3 



34 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

weeks, excluding his parody of Wordsworth, a descrip- 
tion of Oxford in this style : 

" The Gothic looks solemn, 

The plain Doric column 
Supports an old Bishop and crosier ; 

The mouldering arch, 

Shaded o'er by a larch, 
Lives next door to Wilson the hosier. . . ." 

After a few weeks at Hampstead again, he retired 
from the squabbles of Hunt, Haydon, and Horace 
Smith, and the noise of his landlady's children, to get 
" a change of air" and " a spur to wind up " his poem 
at Burford Bridge. There he read Shakespeare's 
Sonnets and "Venus and Adonis," and finished "En- 
dymion." He liked the place for its ** hill and dale and a 
little river," and one of his letters from there tells how 
he went up Box Hill after the moon, came down again, 
and wrote some lines. I seem to see the influence of 
that late autumn and of Box Hill in several parts of the 
fourth book of " Endymion " — in details like the " hazel 
cirque of shedded leaves," but above all in this passage: 

" Where shall our dwelling be ? Under the brow 
Of some steep mossy hill, where ivy dun 
Would hide us up, although spring leaves were none ; 
And where dark yew-trees, as we rustle through, 
Will drop their scarlet-berry cups of dew ! 
O thou wouldst joy to live in such a place ! 
Dusk for our loves, yet light enough to grace 
Those gentle limbs on mossy bed reclined : 
For by one step the blue sky shouldst thou find, 
And by another, in deep dell below. 
See, through the trees, a little river go 
All in its mid-day gold and glimmering. 
Honey from out the gnarled hive I'll bring, 
And apples wan with sweetness gather thee, — 
Cresses that grow where no man may them see. . . ." 



KEATS 35 

At Hampstead that winter he was correcting " En- 
dymion " and exchanging verses with his friend John 
Hamilton Reynolds. Reynolds sent him two sonnets 
on Robin Hood. Keats replied with 

" No, those days are gone away," 

and, inspired by the metre, wrote also the lines on the 
Mermaid Tavern. A Hampstead thrush sang well in 
February, and the poet enjoyed a " delicious diligent 
indolence" in obedience to the thrush's words : 

" O fret not after knowledge — I have none ; 
And yet my song comes native with the warmth. 
O fret not after knowledge— I have none ; 
And yet the evening listens." 

March, April, and part ot May, 1819, he spent at 
Teignmouth, where he wrote most of " Isabella " and 
the prefaces to " Endymion," and some doggerel, but 
had too much rain to like Devonshire. Already he 
was planning a Northern tour with his friend Charles 
Armitage Brown. He wanted to gain experience, rub 
off prejudice, enlarge his vision, load himself with 
finer mountains, strengthen his poetry, make his 
"winter-chair free from spleen," escape literary dis- 
quisitions, and " promote digestion and economize 
shoe-leather." Starting in June from Lancaster, they 
zigzagged through August and part of September to 
Cromart}^, where Keats had to take ship home with 
a bad cold and toothache. They visited Wordsworth's, 
Scott's, and Burns's country. They climbed Skiddaw 
and Ben Nevis. They crossed to Ireland, and to Mull, 
lona, and Staffa. They saw mountains and moun- 
taineers, cataracts, great waters, and eagles. Keats 



Z6 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

wrote poems on Burns at Kirk Alloway, on Meg Mer- 
rilies at Dumfries, on himself at Kirkcudbright : 

" There was a naughty boy, 
A naughty boy was he ; 
He would not stop at home, 
He could not quiet be ;" 

on Ailsa Craig, on Fingal's Cave, and on Ben Nevis, 
while he was fresh from the first impression of them. 
The basalt pillars of Fingal's Cave made him think of 
the Titans who rebelled against Jupiter. When he 
came to write " Hyperion," he remembered the eagles, 
the mountains, the cataracts, the sea-creeks, as he 
described Thea guiding Saturn : 

" Through aged boughs, that yielded like the mist 
Which eagles cleave, upmounting from their nest . . ." 

the Titans groaning, but inaudible, 

" for the solid roar 
Of thunderous waterfalls and torrents hoarse, 
Pouring a constant bulk, uncertain where. 
Crag jutting forth to crag, and rocks that seem'd 
Ever as if just rising from a sleep. 
Forehead to forehead held their monstrous horns . . ." 

or Saturn at the approach of Hyperion : 

" Whose hoar locks 
Shone like the bubbling foam about a keel 
When the prow sweeps into a midnight cove." 

Thus Keats became " an old stager in the pic- 
turesque," as he said himself Thus he learned to 
'* hate descriptions," so that his poems thereafter con- 
tained no mere details verified from a notebook, but 



KEATS 37 

only broad noble features as suitable for heaven or 
hell as for the earth. " Hyperion " was begun in the 
winter of 1818-19, after the Northern tour, when he 
was living with Brown at Wentworth Place, H amp- 
stead. There, too, he began "The Eve of St. Agnes"; 
and both have a stormy and mountainous setting, 
harmonizing with the dethroned and dejected Titans, 
contrasting with the happiness and luxury of the 
lovers, Porphyro and Madeline. 

The next year, Keats's greatest poetic period, was 
spent, half at Hampstead, half in Sussex, Hampshire, 
and the Isle of Wight. He stayed at Chichester in 
January, 1819, with the Dilkes, and at Bedhampton in 
that neighbourhood with the Snooks, relatives of the 
Dilkes. There he wrote down part of " The Eve of 
St. Agnes." Chichester may also have suggested to 
him " The Eve of St. Mark," which, he thought, as he 
was writing it later on at Winchester, gave " the 
sensation of walking about an old country town in 
a coolish evening." The spring and early summer at 
Hampstead produced " La Belle Dame sans Merci," 
most of the odes, and the sonnets on Fame, to Sleep, 
on the Sonnet, and others. But in July he was at 
Shanklin, in the Isle of Wight, with James Rice and 
afterwards Charles Brown. He was, as he put it, 
"at the diligent use of his faculties." He had been 
moulting, and had, he believed, "a pair of patient 
sublunary legs " in exchange for wings. His judg- 
ment was now more deliberate, and when he got into 
" a train of writing " the greatest things came of it. 
" Larhia " was soon half finished. " Otho the Great," 
with Brown's collaboration, progressed at a great pace. 



38 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

" Hyperion " began to grow again. But though he ad- 
mired Bonchurch and Steephill Keats was dissatisfied 
with Shanklin, saying : " The neighbourhood of a rich, 
enclosed, fulsome, manured, arable land, especially in 
a valley and almost as bad on a flat, would be almost 
as bad as the smoke of Fleet Street. Such a place as 
this was Shanklin, only open to the south-east, and 
surrounded by hills in every other direction. From 
this south-east came the damps of the sea, which 
having no egress, the air would for days together take 
on an unhealthy idiosyncrasy altogether enervating 
and weakening as a city smoke." Moving to Win- 
chester early in August, he found the air of St. 
Catherine's Hill " worth sixpence a pint." By the 
beginning of September " Lamia " and '' Otho the 
Great" were finished, "The Eve of St. Agnes" was 
being revised, " The Eve of St. Mark " and " King 
Stephen " begun. " Hyperion " was looked at and 
thrown over. The beauty of the stubble-fields on a 
fine late September Sunday — ** I never liked stubble- 
field so much as now — ay, better than the chilly 
green of the spring," he says — moved him to write the 
stanzas " To Autumn " : 

" While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, 
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue. ..." 

Keats left Winchester early in October, meaning to 
settle in Westminster and make a living at journalism. 
But Fanny Brawne drew him to Hampstead. He 
settled again at Wentworth Place. Between Fanny 
Brawne and " Cap and Bells " and the recast of 
" Hyperion," which he called a vision, he divided 



KEATS 39 

himself down to the last drop of life. When he 
coughed blood in February, 1820, he was a doomed 
man. He wrote no more, except some frantic verses 
to Fanny Brawne, and the last sonnet, which Sir 
S. Colvin attributes to the September night following 
a day spent, apparently, at Lulworth in Dorset, when 
the poet landed for a few hours from the steamer 
which was carrying him to his Roman grave. 



MEREDITH 

IN one sense Meredith is a Londoner's poet, for his 
country is the Londoner's par excellence — Hamp- 
shire, Surrey, Kent, Sussex — and in him the London 
rambler, exulting in the wind over a land of gorse and 
pine on a Saturday or Sunday, seems to reach godlike 
proportions. The beauty of his countrj^ has some- 
thing almost hectic, violent, excessive, about it, caused, 
perhaps, b3^ contrast with the city. Meredith was 
eminently a writer of books and a lover of such society 
as cannot be had often outside of London. What 
wonder, then, that in his poems we so often feel that 
we have come out of London into the fields, as in that 
early " Invitation to the Country"! — 

" Now 'tis spring on wood and wold, 
Early spring that shivers with cold, 
But gladdens and gathers, day by day, 
A lovelier hue, a warmer ray, 
A sweeter song, a dearer ditty : 
Ouzel and throstle, new-mated and gay. 
Singing their bridals on every spray — 
Oh, hear them, deep in the songless city ! 
Cast oii the yoke of toil and smoke, 
As spring is casting winter's grey. 
As serpents cast their skins away : 
And come, for the country awaits thee with pity, 
And longs to bathe thee in her delight. 
And take a new joy in tliy kindling sight. . . ." 

When Meredith was not in London, or travelling, or 
visiting friends, he was, for the greater part of his life, 

40 



MEREDITH 41 

reading and writing in some cottage not very far from 
London, and taking exercise on tlie surrounding heaths 
and hills. At Portsmouth, his birthplace, he spent 
most of his first fourteen years. Then he had two 
years at the Moravian school at Neuwied on the 
Rhine. At sixteen he was in London, his mother 
being dead, his father at the Cape. As a recreation 
from the study of law and literature he took ** long 
walks through the market-gardens of Chelsea into 
Surrey and Middlesex." In 1849, ^t the age of twenty- 
one, he married, and "the next few years were spent 
chiefly on the Continent." He was, however, at Wey- 
bridge in 1850, and for some time boarded there at a 
house called "The Limes." "Love in the Valley" 
is dated Weybridge, May, 185 1, and dedicated to T. L. 
Peacock, his wife's father, then living at Chertsey. 
He was also much at Seaford — in 1856 and 1857, for 
example — and invites his friend Eyre Crowe to share 
the " fishing, bathing, rowing, sailing, lounging, run- 
ning, picnicking, and a cook who builds a basis o\ 
strength to make us equal to all these superhuman 
efforts." These were the years when he was writing 
his early poems and " The Shaving of Shagpat," 
" Emilia [sic] Belloni," and the story of " The House on 
the Beach." He was inquiring for a book of Hampshire 
dialect, planning " Richard Feverel." Esher was his 
next home. He moved there with his boy, aged five, 
but without his wife, in 1858, first to a cottage in the 
village, afterwards to Copsham Cottage, between 
Esher and Oxshott. For neighbour, and companion 
in walking, he had William Hardman, afterwards 
editor of the Morning Post, and original of Blackburn 



42 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

Tuckham in " Beauchamp." Meredith showed him the 
place where he wrote the fifth pastoral : 

" Now from the meadow floods the wild-duck clamours, 
Now the wood-pigeon wings a rapid flight, 
Now the homeward rookery follows up its vanguard, 
And the valley mists are curUng up the hills. 

" Three short songs gives the clear- voiced throstle, 
Sweetening the twilight ere he fills the nest ; 
While the little bird upon the leafless branches 
Tweets to its mate a tiny loving note. 

" Deeper the stillness hangs on every motion ; 
Calmer the silence follows every call ; 
Now all is quiet save the roosting pheasant, 
The bell-wether's tinkle, and the watch-dog's bark. 

" Softly shine the lights from the silent kindling homestead, 
Stars of the hearth to the shepherd in the fold ; 
Springs of desire to the traveller on the roadway ; 
Ever breathing incense to the ever-blessing sky." 

To read this, and to know that it was written on 
" an eminence surrounded by pines on the St. George's 
Hill Estate," is to know something of Meredith's habits 
as man and writer in his early thirties. His letters 
often have at least a window open to earth and sky. 
One day "the smell of the earth is Elysian" ; then he 
and everyone is "in suspense to know whether we are 
to get a daily ducking or live the life of non -purgatorial 
beings through the months " ; but he has walked over 
to Box Hill in sunshine in the interval. In 1862, in the 
month of May, he was walking with Hardman, reading- 
some of the aphorisms afterwards known through 
" Richard Feverel." Their route was by Mickleham 
(avoiding Leatherhead), Burford Bridge, Dorking, and 
Shere, and along Merrow Down to Newlands Corner, 
by Albury (Martin Tupper's Albury), Guildford, and 



MEREDITH 43 

Godalming, to Milford, where they had tea, bed, and 
breakfast (with chops), for three shillings and sixpence ; 
then over Hindhead to Haslemere. The weather had 
been magnificent, the nightingales at their best, the 
landscape extending to the Crystal Palace and the 
Hog's Back. 

John Morley and Cotter Morison were among his 
visitors and companions. But he could do without 
company, and at night, too. For, as he told Miss 
Vulliamy, reassuring her that walking back at night 
from Mickleham was no hardship, he was " an asso- 
ciate with owls and nightjars, tramps and tinkers," 
who taught him Nature and talked human nature to 
him. He was then writing of Harry Richmond, a hero 
for whom " stars and tramps seemed to go together." 

Meredith had a regular day every week "on press 
duty" in London, and in 1862 and afterwards tried the 
plan of sharing 16, Cheyne Walk at intervals with 
Rossetti, Swinburne, and Morris. But he did not give 
up Copsham Cottage, and was repeatedly ("running 
twice a day between Mickleham and Copsham ") at 
Mickleham, " at the sign of The Angel," with Miss 
Vulliamy, until he married her in 1864. He was on 
Mickleham Downs a week before Christmas, 1864, 
" where the great herded yews stand on a pure snow- 
field. I thought to have fallen on the very throne of 
Silence. In a few paces I became a Druid. . . ." 
He seems to have lived alternately in 1865-6-7 at 
Mickleham and Kingston Lodge, Kingston-on-Thames. 
As early as 1868 he wrote from Box Hill, where his 
visitors included Robert Louis Stevenson, who stayed 
at the Burford Arms with his mother in 1878. It was 



44 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

nine years later that the chalet was ready for Meredith, 
and that he was inviting John Morley to see it and the 
view that was " without a match in Surrey " : 

" I work and sleep up in my cottage at present, and 
anything grander than the days and nights at my 
porch you will not find away from the Alps ; for the 
dark line of my hill runs up to the stars, the valley 
below is a soundless gulf. There I pace like a ship- 
man before turning in.* In the day, with the south- 
west blowing, I have a brilliant universe rolling up 
to me. . . ." 

Here he was to write for thirty years. 

Two years later the order of "Sunday Tramps" — 
" that noble body of scholarly and cheerful pedestrians," 
Meredith calls it — was founded by Leslie Stephen. 
F. W. Maitland, Sir Frederick Pollock, J. Cotter 
Morison, Douglas Freshfield, R. G. Marsden, and 
A. J. Butler, were of the order. Stephen's was an 
"unlimited paternal despotism," and at the station, 
collecting his flock, he had " the solicitous look of a 
schoolmaster." Ten was a good assembly. Meredith 
just mentions them in 1880. Writing to R. L. Stevenson, 
he tells how he and his son, W. M. Meredith, with a 
sack of cold sausages, Apollinaris and hock, met 
them at old Dorking station ; how they walked to Leith 
Hill, "consumed the soul of the sack," talked and 
smoked, and then by Friday Street " into the sloping- 
meadows each side the Tillingbourne, leaping through 
Evelyn's Wotton, along under Ranmore to our cottage , 
and dinner." Stephen was leader or " Pied Piper." 
That whole network of paths were to him " the scene 
of personally conducted expeditions, in which," he says 



MEREDITH 45 

" I displayed the skill on which I most pride myself — 
skill, I mean, in devising judicious geographical com- 
binations, and especially of contriving admirable short- 
cuts." He was, says Meredith himself, the original of 
Vernon Whitford in " The Egoist," For a short time 
— "when I was in health," he says in 1882 — Meredith 
himself was of the party ; later he used to meet them 
on their way, when they dined with him and started 
for London at ten. " Tramping with them one has 
the world under review, as well as pretty scenery." 
Meredith was a talking walker. He declared that a 
shorthand writer in attendance on the Tramps would 
have been a benefactor to the country, but F. W. 
Maitland's view was that " the occasions on which the 
presence of a shorthand writer was desirable coincided 
somewhat exactly with those on which Mr. Meredith 
honoured us with his company." Mr. Comyns Carr 
records that Meredith would occupy the whole of a 
walk with " a purely inventive biography of some one 
of our common friends, passing in rather burlesque 
rhapsody from incident to incident of a purely hypo- 
thetical career, but always preserving in the most 
extravagant of his fancies a proper relevancy to the 
character he was seeking to exhibit." 

Tramping or not, he did not cease to love the earth 
and the sea, the south-west wind and the rain. When 
he was sixty he was walking, bathing, getting drenched 
with rain, and learning some Welsh, in visits that 
extended from Tenby through Llanelly, Llandilo, and 
Llandrindod, to Brecon. When he was sixty-three he 
held the opinion that February with a south-west 
wind blowing is *' as good as any spring," and looked 



46 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

forward to a south-westerly April and May. At 
seventy-nine he was answering an inquiry as to the 
meaning of " the dark-winged planet " in the " Hymn 
to Colour " : 

" If you observe the planet Venus at the hour when 
the dawn does no more than give an intimation, she is 
full of silver, and darkness surrounds her. So she 
seems to me to fly on dark wings. . . ." 

A year later, in 1908, appeared ** Youth in Age " : 

" Once I was part of the music I heard 

On the boughs or sweet between earth and sky, 
For joy of the beating of wings on high 
My heart shot into the breast of the bird. 

" I hear it now and I see it fly, 

And a life in wrinkles again is stirred ■ 
My heart shoots into the breast of the bird, 
As it will for sheer love till the last long sigh." 

He died in the year after. 

Meredith's country is the country of many of his 
characters. It is summed up in two sentences of 
" Diana of the Crossways." Diana and Emma are 
driving together at Copsley : 

" Through an old gravel-cutting a gateway led to the 
turf of the down, springy turf bordered on a long line, 
clear as a racecourse, by golden gorse covers, and 
leftward over the gorse the dark-ridge of the fir and 
heath country ran companionably to the south-west, 
the valley between, with undulations of wood and 
meadow sunned or shaded, clumps, mounds, promon- 
tories, away to broad spaces of tillage banked by 
wooded hills, and dimmer beyond, and farther, the 
faintest shadowiness of heights, as a veil to the illimit- 
able. Yews, junipers, radiant beeches, and gleams of 



MEREDITH 47 

the service-tree or the white-beam, spotted the semi- 
circle of swelling green Down black and silver." 

It is always Hampshire or Surrey, or it is no place 
in particular ; always "the great heaths " or the Downs, 
or the meadows in sight of them. And it is odd if 
there is not some walker after Meredith's own heart 
among the characters. Mr. Rhodes in **• Diana" 
wanted a walk, and started at two in the morning out 
of London to Copsley. Harry Richmond felt that 
houses imprisoned us, that a lost father was not to be 
dis(X)vered by remaining in them. " Plunged among 
dark green leaves, smelling wood-smoke, at night ; at 
morning waking up, and the world alight, and you 
standing high, and marking the hills where you will 
see the next morning and the next, morning after 
morning ;" this was "a heavenly pleasure." He lodged 
with gipsies. And then Vernon Whitford in " The 
Egoist," the " lean long - walker and scholar," a 
" Phoebus Apollo turned fasting friar," who " attacked 
the dream-giving earth with tremendous long strides, 
that his blood might be lively at the throne of under- 
standing." When Meredith has got Whitford walking 
he himself walks too, and does not stick too closely to 
the editor of the ** Dictionary of National Biography " 
and author of "The English Utilitarians": 

" Rain was universal ; a thick robe of it swept from 
hill to hill ; thunder rumbled remote, and between the 
muffled roarst he downpour pressed on the land with 
a great noise of eager gobbling, much like that of the 
swine's trough fresh filled, as though a vast assembly 
of the hungered had seated themselves clamorously 
and fallen to on meats and drinks in a silence, save of 



48 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

the chaps, A rapid walker poetically and humorously 
minded gathers multitudes of images on his way. 
And rain, the heaviest you can meet, is a lively com- 
panion when the resolute pacer scorns discomfort 
of wet clothes and squealing boots. South-western 
rain-clouds, too, are never long sullen : they enfold 
and will have the earth in a good strong glut of the 
kissing overflow ; then, as a hawk with feathers on his 
beak of the bird in his claw lifts head, they rise, and 
take veiled feature in long climbing watery lines : at 
any moment they may break the veil and show soft 
upper cloud, show sun on it, show sky, green near the 
verge they spring from, of the green of grass in early 
dew ; or, along a travelling sweep that rolls asunder 
overhead, heaven's laughter of purest blue among 
titanic white shoulders : it may mean fair smiling for 
awhile, or be the lightest interlude ; but the watery 
lines, and the drifting, the chasing, the upsoaring, all 
in a shadowy fingering of form, and the animation of 
the leaves of the trees pointing them on, the bending 
of the tree-tops, the snapping of branches, and the 
hurrahings of the stubborn hedge at wrestle with the 
flaws, yielding but a leaf at most, and that on a fling^ 
make a glory of contest and wildness without aid of 
colour to inflame the man who is at home in them from 
old association on road, heath, and mountain. Let 
him be drenched, his heart will sing. And then, trim 
cockney, that jeerest, consider thyself, to whom it may 
occur to be out in such a scene, and with what steps 
of a nervous dancing-master it would be thine to play 
the hunted rat of the elements for the preservation of 
the one imagined dry spot about thee, somewhere on 
thy luckless person ! The taking of rain and sun alike 
befits men of our climate, and he who would have the 
secret of a strengthening intoxication must court the 
clouds of the south-west with a lover's blood," 



MEREDITH 49 

A walk for him is an intellectual thing. He enjoys 
it, but knows also that it is good for him, body and 
soul. The Earth is our ancient Mother, and our nurse 
also, with a medicine cupboard near the bed. The 
south-west wind is in one bottle. " Thus," says he, 
" does Nature restore us, by drugging the brain and 
making her creature confidingly animal for its new 
growth." That bottle is not spared in any of his 
books. His beautiful women have drunken of it. They 
are goddesses. One is called into her lover's mind 
with the smell of salt — " that other spirit of woman, of 
whom the controlled sea-deeps were an image, who 
spoke to my soul in starlight." Another is "a swift 
wild spirit " who " gives you an idea of the Mountain 
Echo." 

As Mr. G. M. Trevelyan says : " The characters in 
his novels put on their full grandeur only when they 
stand in direct contact with Nature : Vernon Whitford 
in his sleep under the wild white [double] cherry- 
tree; Diana by the mountain pool above the Italian 
lake ; Beauchamp at sea or under the Alps at dawn ; 
Ottilia at sea or in the thunderstorm ; Emilia by 
Wilming Weir or in the moonlit fir-tree glade ; Carin- 
thia Jane when she goes out to " call the morning" in 
her mountain home ; Lucy by the plunging weir, amid 
the bilberries, long grass, and meadowsweet." But in 
his poetry you have in its concentrated hieroglyphics 
the religion of which the novels exhibit some of the 
characteristics as found in the laity. Then you have 

walking — 

" A pride of legs in motion kept 

Our spirits to their task meanwhile, 
And what was deepest dreaming slept " 
4 



so A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

— and the incidents of walking, as a pleasure, as a joy, 
as a medicine. For the Tramps themselves, and lor all 
other Sunday or week-day walkers who delight in one 
another's company, and talk as they walk, he wrote 
the " Stave of Roving Tim ": 

" You live in rows of snug abodes, 
With gold, maybe, for counting ; 
And mine's the beck of the rainy roads 
Against the sun a-mounting." 

And the joy of the limbs, the senses, and the brain, 
during country walks — in certain isolated days — are 
expressed by Meredith once and for all, with a kind of 
braced hedonistic Puritanism. But though he loved 
what he saw and heard and touched, his poetry was 
never purely sensuous, and it became less and less so. 
Like Shelley, he felt the moral qualities of Nature. It 
has been said of Shelley's lark, " Bird thou never wert"; 
and of Meredith's, that it is a real lark. But this is a 
mistake. Meredith was more of a naturalist, and he 
belonged to a generation of amateur naturalists, but he 
gets at least as far away from the bird as Shelley does, 
if he starts closer. Tastes differ, but to me what is 
descriptive in the poem reminds me too much of the 
bird. I can always hear a lark, and no man can do 
more than interest me by an imaged inventory of what 
it says. The opening passage of " The Lark Ascend- 
ing " shows observation, admiration, and delight, and 
they are well served by fancy ; the result is an encum- 
brance of words and a dispersed impression, half 
sensuous, half intellectual. That it was done with the 
e3'-e on the object is obvious, but not to the point, 
except that it is thus distinguished from other poems 



MEREDITH 51 

relating to larks. What gives it a great claim is that 
it was done, and that very clearly, by a man in whom, 
as in no other, says Mr, Justin McCarthy, the physical 
and mental forces were absolute rivals and equals. 
The same is true of a great portion of Meredith's 
poetry, and I shall not dispute whether it can be fully 
enjoyed by those possessing neither the same powers 
nor the same balance between them. Nature to him 
was not merely a cause of sensuous pleasure, nor, on 
the other hand, an inhuman enchantress ; neither was 
she both together. When he spoke of Earth, he meant 
more than most mean who speak of God. He meant 
that power which in the open air, in poetry, in the 
company of noble men and women, prompted, strength- 
ened, and could fulfil, the desire of a man to make him- 
self, not a transitory member of a parochial species, 
but a citizen of the Earth. Thus, in his view, a man 
could smile after all things. Of Shakespeare, for 
example, he says : 

" Thy greatest knew thee, Mother Earth ; unsoured 
He knew thy sons. He probed from hell to hell 
Of human passions, but of love deflowered 
His wisdom was not, for he knew thee well. 
Thence came the honeyed corner at his lips. ..." 

And Byron he pronounces an infidel, as not knowing 
Earth, but summoning her " with bile and bilious atti- 
tude." He seeks a superb health. Nature has inspired 
him to the search. Nature alone can satisfy it. She 
seems to him to offer sanity, true perspective. In 
" The Lark Ascending " he speaks of men " by many 
a battle-dint defaced," but yielding a substance worthy 
of poetry, which chooses them 

" Because their love of Earth is deep." 



52 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

So in "Nature and Life " he speaks of men retiring to 
Nature, and thence returning to men : 

" Back to them for manful air, 
Laden with the woodland's heart." 

There are places where his personal refinement 
seems to have reduced him to something like a varia- 
tion upon " God made the country," as when he ad- 
dresses the thrush in February : 

" Bird of happy breath ! 
I hear, I would the cit}? heard, 
The city of the smoky fray ; 
A prodded ox, it drags and moans : 
Its Morrow no man's child ; its Da}^ 
A vulture's morsel beaked to bones." 

He is always lean and hard, an athlete among poets- 
Sometimes he is overtrained, too fine. He got away 
from the Earth and the things of the Earth to intellec- 
tual analogues of them, outran the measure (wrote, for 
example, a kind of shorthand instead of poetry), allowed 
his love to exceed too far 

" a simple love of th^ things 
That glide in grasses and rubble of wood}^ wreck," 

forsook " the great heaths " bordering the Portsmouth 
Road — he always lived near the Portsmouth Road — 
and took to regions of the mind where blows a keener 
and more desolating wind than ever blew from the 
thirty-two points. But at best his poetry is good 
walking country in good walking weather. His 
nightingales are " real nightingales," very distantly re- 
lated to Philomela. There are no fumes in his brain, and 
thence in his poetry. His country is English — not so 
English as Tennyson's ; it is too Meredithian for that — 
his planet is indubitably the Earth, of which he was 
one of the most loyal and distinguished inhabitants. 



THE THAMES 

SHELLEY 

ARNOLD 

MORRIS 



SHELLEY 

THAT Shelley was born at Horsham, went to school 
at Isleworth and Eton, and to University College, 
Oxford, sojourned in North and South Wales, in Cum- 
berland, Devon, Berkshire, and Buckinghamshire, and 
in London — so much is true ; but of few poets is it less 
true that he has a country and a topography distinctly 
his own. There are great mountains in his poems,"eagle- 
baffling " mountains — Alpine, Caucasian, Himalayan — 
rivers and lakes and islands, forests and meadows, 
cliffs and caves, and we know that he saw some of the 
finest examples of these things which the earth has to 
show. I am not about to trace or conjecture the 
origin of all the heavenly mountains and ocean-seeking 
rivers of his poems. I have no theory as to the original 
of that " little lawny islet," neither have I gone in search 
of the shelving bank of turf 

" which lay 
Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling 
Its green arms round the bosom of the stream, 
But kissed it and then fled, as thou mightest in dream." 

I do not propose to show that Shelley was a 
thoroughly Sussex poet because the great snake in 
the Field Place garden and the legendary one of 
St. Leonard's Forest may have given him the primary 
impulse towards creating magnificent serpents in 

55 



56 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

poetry. All we know is that Field Place and that 
woodland country provided some of the strange meats 
that must have gone to the making of so strange a 
man. Field Place itself, for example, was such a house 
that he could, as a boy, and for the benefit of his 
younger sisters, imagine a long-bearded alchemist in- 
habiting the garret under its roof. But when he was 
ten, and at school in Isleworth, he read Ann Rad- 
cliffe's tales, which seem to have played almost as 
large a part in the composition of Shelley as Field 
Place, near Horsham, did. 

Two years later Shelley went to Eton College. 
Eton is one of the few English place-names mentioned 
in Shelley's verse. The passage, a piece of pure, un- 
heightened memory, is in the fragmentary " Boat on 
the Serchio," where the men, Melchior and Lionel, are 
provisioning the boat : 

" ' Ay, heave the ballast overboard, 
And stow the eatables in the aft locker.' 
' Would not this keg be best a little lowered ?' 
' No ; now all's right.' ' Those bottles of warm tea — 
(Give me some straw) — must be stowed tenderly ; 
Such as we used, in summer after six. 
To cram in greatcoat pockets, and to mix 
Hard eggs and radishes and rolls at Eton, 
And, couched on stolen hay in those green harbours 
Farmers called gaps, and we schoolboys called arbours, 
Would feast till eight.' " 

From this it is clear that he sometimes enjoyed him- 
self as if he were going to develop into " a woodland 
fellow that loved a great fire," instead of an angelic 
poet. Not often did he write in a manner per- 
mitting the direct use of what the eyes saw. When 



SHELLEY 57 

he did, he could either be literal, as in "The Sunset," 
which begins : 

"He walked along the pathway of a field 
Which to the east a hoar wood shadowed o'er, 
But to the west was open to the sky ..." 

or he could loiter luxuriously over natural details for 
their own sake, as in " The Question," which has 
some very English passages. These two lines, 

" And in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine, 
Green cowbind, and the moonlight-coloured may," 

are very English ; so are these three : 

" And floating water-lilies, broad and bright, 
Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge 
With moonlight beams of their own watery light." 

A few other references to his school days are to be 
found in Shelley's poetry, the chief one being that in 
the dedication to " The Revolt of Islam," where he 
speaks of " the hour which burst his spirit's sleep ": 

"A fresh May-dawn it was. 
When I walked forth upon the glittering grass, 
And wept, I knew not why ; until there rose 
From the near schoolroom voices that, alas ! 
Were but one echo from a world of woes — 
The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes." 

Whether this was at Isleworth or Eton is unknown. 
Certainly it was at Eton that he met the Dr. Lind 
who afterwards appeared in " The Revolt of Islam " as 
the Hermit, " stately and beautiful," and as Zonoras in 
*' Prince Athanase ": 

" An old, old man, with hair of silver white. 
And lips where heavenly smiles would hang and blend 
With his wise words. ..." 



58 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

Above all, we know that at Eton Shelley learned to 
love rivers. From the time he went to school to his 
last residence in England, Shelley was never long away 
from some part of the River Thames. 

At Oxford he used to walk out with Hogg regularly 
in the afternoons : " it was his delight to strike boldly 
into the fields, to cross the country daringly on foot, 
as is usual with sportmen in shooting, to perform, as 
it were, a pedestrian steeplechase." But Isis and Cher- 
well, Bagley Woods, and Shotover Hill, enter into his 
poems, if at all, under many veils or transmutations. 

After 1 8 10, the year of his entrance at University 
College, Oxford, Shelley was very little at Field Place 
again, and then usually agitated by love, romantic 
composition, or filial impiety. For example, a letter 
to Hogg reveals him in January, i8ii, "most of the 
night pacing a churchyard," and apparently composing 
the verses " On an Icicle." He was then in the depths 
of his wretchedness over the breaking off of his en- 
gagement, or understanding, with his cousin, Harriet 
Grove. 

Before the end of March and of the next term at the 
University, Shelley had quitted Oxford for ever. His 
wanderings had begun. He was never again to spend 
more than a few consecutive months in any place. 
From lodgings in Poland Street he used to meet 
Harriet Westbrook at or near her school on Clapham 
Common. In July and August he was in Radnorshire* 
at his cousin Thomas Grove's house, Cwm Elan, near 
Rhayader. Wales he found " excessively grand," the 
scenery " most divine " and '* highly romantic," but 
nothing to him in the agitation of his mind ; for the 



SHELLEY 59 

Westbrooks were at Condowell, on their way to 
Aberystwith. He told Hogg he did not much regard 
the woods, the cloudy mountains, the waterfalls ; to 
Miss Hitchener he wrote that he was " not wholly un- 
influenced by their magic" in his lonely walks, but 
longed for a thunderstorm. He had married Harriet 
Westbrook in Edinburgh before the end of August. 
The end of the year was spent at Chesnut Cottage, 
Keswick, in sight of Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite. 
Even during his trouble over Hogg's advances to 
Harriet, the scenery, which was "awfully grand," 
affected him. In calmer mood he wrote to Miss 
Hitchener : 

" I have taken a long solitary ramble to-day. These 
gigantic mountains piled on each other, these water- 
falls, these million-shaped clouds tinted by the varying 
colours of innumerable rainbows hanging between your- 
self and a lake as smooth and dark as a plain of polished 
jet — oh, these are sights attainable to the contemplation. 
I have been much struck by the grandeur of its imagery. 
Nature here sports in the awful waywardness of her 
solitude ; the summits of the loftiest of these immense 
piles of rock seem but to elevate Skiddawand Helvellyn. 
Imagination is resistlessly compelled to look back upon 
the myriad ages whose silent change placed them here ; 
to look back, when perhaps this retirement of peace 
and mountain simplicity was the pandemonium of 
druidical imposture, the scene of Roman pollution, the 
resting-place of the savage denizen of these solitudes 
with the wolf. ..." 

He was thinking of Man and Freedom and Virtue ; 
the mountains provided an harmonious accompaniment 
to his mistily aspiring thoughts, and their grandeur 



6o A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

was to him already in part moral and spiritual. No 
man could stand the same test as the mountains stood. 
He visited Southey, once one of his lords and masters, 
and found him '* the paid champion of every abuse and 
absurdity," who said : " You will think as I do when 
you are as old." Some of his letters of this winter 
contain poems written at Keswick, one in Wordsworth's 

style : 

" For seven years did this poor woman live 
In unparticipated solitude. 
Thou mightst have seen her in the forest rude 
Picking the scattered remnants of its wood. . . ." 

Another, in the style of Southey and Coleridge (when 
on the spree): 

" The Devil went out a- walking one day, 
Being tired of staying in hell. 
He dressed himself in his Sunday array. . . ." 

More consonant with his mountain mood were the 
letters which he poured forth to Miss Hitchener and 
the " Address to the Irish People " then under his 
hands. He was to spend two months in Ireland early 
in 1812. 837^ the middle of April he was once more in 
Radnorshire. 

Shelley wrote a little later a " Hail to thee, Cambria," 
in which he said : 

" True mountain liberty alone may heal 
The pain which custom's obduracies bring." 

He had dreamed of domesticating " in some antique 
feudal castle whose mouldering turrets are fit emblems 
of deca3'-ing inequality and oppression ; whilst the ivy 
shall wave its green banners above like liberty, and 
flourish upon the edifice that essayed to crush its root.'» 



SHELLEY 6i 

Observe how Nature has to bow to morality. His ideas 
were stronger than his surroundings. He says he 
would welcome ghosts, because "they would tell tales 
of times of old ; and it would add to the picturesque- 
ness of the scenery to see their thin forms flitting 
through the vaulted charnels." His stay was first at 
Nantgwillt, again near Rhayader, " embosomed in the 
solitude of mountains, woods, and rivers — silent, soli- 
tary, and old, far away from any town." He was again 
in exalted mood, calling Miss Hitchener, by an image 
taken from among the mountains, " a thunder-riven 
pinnacle of rock firm amid the rushing tempest and 
the boiling surge." His hope was to have made the 
house "the asylum of distressed virtue, the rendezvous 
of the friends of liberty and truth," but his security was 
not good enough. He moved on to Cwm Elan, thence 
to Lynmouth, having written his " Letter to Lord Ellen- 
borough," and a long poem in couplets called "The 
Retrospect : Cwm Elan," where he addresses the 
woods and mountains that had witnessed the solitary 
sadness of his former visit, 

" The sunken eye, the withering 
Sad traces of the unuttered pain 
That froze my heart and burned my brain . . ." 

but addresses finally his wife, who gilds the gloomiest 
retrospect, 

"by the reviving ray 
Which thou hast flung upon my day." 

It is one of the few of Shelley's early poems which, 
being turned to for curiosity, are read with pleasure — 
pleasure derived from its sincere relation to human 
feelings and its approach to individual style. 



62 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

Probably Shelley had also brought with him to Lyn- 
mouth some beginnings of " Queen Mab." At Lyn- 
mouth it made some progress, in spite of Shelley's 
correspondence with Godwin, the arrival of his Sussex 
acquaintance, Miss Hitchener, and the surveillance that 
followed on the imprisonment of his servant for post- 
ing up the Declaration of Rights in Barnstaple. 
" Queen Mab " is not a poem to reflect much of the 
beauty of this earth. Nor do any of Shelley's poems 
obviously reflect Lynmouth. The Valley of Rocks, 
however, must have contributed something to the 
grand composite landscape of Shelley's mind. The 
beauty surrounding them seemed to him to equal that 
of Nantgwillt, to Harriet to excel it. " All 'shows of 
sky and earth, of sea and valley,' are here," says he. 
According to Hogg, recollections and memorials of 
the Valley of Rocks abounded among those "points, 
spires, and pinnacles of rocks and crags " scrawled or 
sketched by Shelley on fly-leaves, backs of letters, note- 
books, etc. 

" Queen Mab " was carried on slowly, but to an end, 
at Tan-yr-allt, near Tremadoc in Carnarvonshire, 
where Shelley alighted next after quitting Devonshire. 
Once more he was in mountain country, the most 
" strikingly grand " he had yet seen. Once more he 
was considerably perplexed by affairs, this time the 
procuring of subscriptions towards the completion of 
an embankment to reclaim land on the coast of Car- 
narvonshire. 

Having flown to Ireland — as far as Killarney — and 
away again, Shelley stayed some time in and about 
London. Here his daughter lanthe was born in June, 



SHELLEY 63 

18 1 3. The family thought of going to Nantgwillt for a 
third time, but travelled through Stratford-on-Avon 
and the Lake Country to Edinburgh instead. 

In the following year, when staying with friends at 
Bracknell in Berkshire, Shelley wrote the first poem 
in which he is himself, something like all himself, and 
nothing but himself; and it is an intensely local poem. 
I mean the stanzas dated April, 18 14, which begin : 

" Away ! the moor is dark beneath the moon ; 

Rapid clouds have drank the last pale beam of even : 
Away ! the gathering winds will call the darkness soon, 

And profoundest midnight shroud the serene lights of heaven. . . ." 

The poem reflects one moment of space and time in the 
beginning of Shelley's estrangement from Harriet. In 
fact, so powerfully did the circumstances of the moment 
impress themselves on Shelley that they were repro- 
duced in a manner which only an intimate could under- 
stand. For example, in the last verse : 

" Thou in the grave shalt rest — yet, till the phantoms flee . 

Which that house and heath and garden made dear to thee 
erewhile, 
Thy remembrance, and repentance, and deep musings, are not free 
From the music of two voices and the light of one sweet smile." 

He told Hogg in a letter of the same period that the 
house at Bracknell was a paradise, that his heart sick- 
ened at the necessity of leaving " the delightful tran- 
quillity of this happy home — for it has become my 
home. The trees, the bridge, the minutest objects, 
have already a place in my affections." 

By July Shelley had left England with Mary Godwin. 
It was a year before he could begin to think of settling 



64 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

down to rest from his tortures in London at the hands_ 
of Harriet, his creditors, and his mistress's father — a 
period in which he learned to know *' the dark mid- 
night river when the moon is down." He spent part 
of July, 1815, looking for a house in South Devon. In 
August he and Mary were settled at Bishopgate, at the 
edge of Windsor Forest, not far from Bracknell or from 
Eton. With Peacock, who lived at Marlow, he took 
to boating. Their water journey at the end of August 
was the occasion of a poem — " A Summer Evening 
Churchyard " — which Shelley particularly connects 
with a place : Lechlade in Gloucestershire. It is if 
anything less local than '* Away ! the moor is dark," 
because the place did but ripen an old emotion ; yet 
a man who cared for Shelley would hardly see Lech- 
lade Church without some emotion at thought of that 
burning-eyed poet having stood there and noticed 

" The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass 
Knows not their gentle motions as they pass." 

That same warm, dry summer and autumn helped 
Shelley to write " Alastor." " He spent his days," says 
Mrs. Shelley, " under the oak shades of Windsor Great 
Park ; and the magnificent woodland was a fitting 
study to inspire the various descriptions of forest 
scenery we find in that poem." 

The Swiss tour, commemorated by "Mont Blanc" 
and the " Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," came between 
Shelley's residence at Bishopgate and his residence at 
Marlow. He was to and fro between London, Marlow, 
and Bath, in the winter of 1816-17; then in February, 
181 7, he took Albion House at Marlow, having with 



SHELLEY 65 

him not only Mary, but her step-sister, Claire Clair- 
mont, and Allegra, the daughter of Claire and Byron. 
Shelley used to walk with Peacock the thirty-two 
miles to London. He wandered alone, " sometimes 
rather fantastically arrayed," with a wreath of old- 
man's-beard and wild-flowers upon his head. He also 
visited the poor lace-makers in winter-time, bringing 
presents of food, money, or clothing. The summer was 
fine, and Shelley often divided his days between the 
river and the riverside woods. " Laon and Cythna," 
his summer task, was written "in his boat," says Mrs. 
Shelley, "as it floated under the beech -groves of 
Bisham, or during wanderings in the neighbouring- 
country," Peacock says it was chiefly written " on a 
high prominence in Bisham Wood, where he passed 
whole mornings with a blank book and a pencil." 
Shelley himself, in the dedicatory stanzas of the poem, 
refers to his retreat : 

" Where the woods to fi-ame a bower 
With interlaced branches mix and meet, 
Or where, with sound like many voices sweet, 
Waterfalls leap among wild islands green, 
Which framed for my lone boat a lone retreat 
Of moss-grown trees and weeds. . . ." 

And, ver}'' naturally, a poem written rapidly in such 
a place reflects the river and the woods of Marlow. 
It begins with a river and ends with one. The first 
canto has a boat designed for Ariel to wind "among 
the lawny islands fair" : 

" A boat of rare device, which had no sail 
But its own curved prow of thin moonstone, 
Wrought like a web of texture fine and frail. ..." 

5 



66 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 
The last canto has another boat : 

" One curved shell of hollow pearl, 
Almost translucent with the hght divine 
Of her within ; the prow and stern did curl 
HornM on high, like the young moon supine, 
When o'er dim twilight mountains dark with pine 
It floats upon the sunset's sea of beams, 
Whose golden waves in many a purple line 
Fade fast, till borne on sunlight's ebbing streams, 
Dilating, on earth's verge the sunken meteor gleams. 

At the beginning of the third canto he mentions the 
clambering briony : 

" Methought, upon the threshold of a cave 
I sate with Cythna ; drooping briony, pearled 
With dew from the wild streamlet's sheltered wave, 
Hung, where we sate to taste the joys which Nature gave." 

I doubt if it had been mentioned before by any 
English poet. In any case, its name is an unexpected 
invasion of an English hedge plant in such a poem, 
though it must be remembered that at this time 
Shelley was subject to an " unnatural and keen excite- 
ment," when " the very blades of grass and the boughs 
of distant trees " presented themselves with micro- 
scopical distinctness. 

The fragments of " Prince Athanase " and an un- 
finished version of " Rosalind and Helen " were also 
written at Marlow. But these might have been written 
anywhere, while "The Revolt" at least owes much 
of its surface colouring to the accident of Shelley's 
presence at Marlow. The stay lasted almost a year. 
The house was damp. Shelley believed that health, 
and even life, had to be sought in Italy. He sold the 
house in February. For an interval of a few days he 



SHELLEY 67 

lodged at 119, Great Russell Street, and saw Hunt, 
Hogg, Peacock, Keats, and Mary Lamb, who lived in 
the same street. He left England in March, never to 
return, but to write poetry where Italy is mirrored 
more than England, and still more a kind of not wholly 
unearthly paradise that he had already imagined in 
Wales and England, as he walked their mountains 
and woods, or lay on his back looking up at their 
clouds and firmament 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S two best known 
poems, "The Scholar Gipsy" and " Thyrsis," 
have been accused of being too topographical, be- 
cause they name so many places. But the accusation 
is needless. The mention of all those places at that 
time fameless has chiefly the effect of adding to the 
intimacy of the poems. In a way, it is a kind of artful 
naivete, expecting all the world either to know or to 
care what Eynsham or Sandford signifies. But, of 
course, it counts also to some extent, and safely, on 
the fact that this twelve-mile loop of the Thames, 
between the entrances of the Windrush and the Cher- 
well, and the hilly country enclosed bj^ it, is exception- 
ally v/ell known to a good sprinkling of Arnold's 
most likely readers. How Cambridge people or 
Newcastle people are reached by this " topography " 
I cannot say, but I doubt if it is at all necessary to 
be Oxonian to enjoy it. No doubt it touches Oxford 
men on a weak spot, and at times may have too much 
credit for doing so. The important thing, however, 
is that the intimacy implied by this naming goes well 
with the affection confessed in the poem, and helps the 
reader to take up the suggestions made by hills, trees, 
rivers and blossoms, and distant spires, and thus to 
compose a landscape which can exist without use of 

68 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 69 

map or previous association. That is Arnold's country 
par excellence. 

He was .born at Laleham on the Thames, near 
Staines, in 1822. At eighteen he went up to Oxford as 
an undergraduate, and spent four years there. He 
returned at thirty-four as Professor of Poetry. The 
river and the riverside woods and hills were part 
of the scenery and the dramatis personce of his life 
at three important periods. Though he left Laleham 
for Rugby at the age of five, he came back again two 
years later. Between thirteen and eighteen he was at 
Winchester on a river and among chalk hills, while some 
of his holidays were spent at Fox How, near Grasmere, 
where Dr. Arnold had taken a house of refuge from 
the Rugby country. Still at forty-four he remembered, 
when he found a saxifrage on the mounds of the 
ruined castle at Bungay, that it used to grow " in 
the field on the way to papa's bathing-place at Rugby." 
The Trent country, too, round Fledborough, in Notting- 
hamshire, touched him on revisiting it years after 
he had learnt it with his mother, whose father was 
Vicar there. But Laleham and Oxford were the 
capitals of his country. Fox How was a detached 
portion of it. There he had Wordsworth and Harriet 
Martineau for neighbours, and met Charlotte Bronte 
(in 1850). The mountains and the lakes were much; 
the garden of the house was something, and in early 
middle age he wrote to his mother rather particu- 
larly about it, saying that not enough was made there 
of arbutus, and advising as to the evergreens, laurel 
and rhododendron, to be planted, " but neither the one 
nor the other thick enough to be crowded." Fox How 



70 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

became " the House of Paradise" to Arnold's children. 
He himself often revisited and made excursions in that 
country, sleeping at Strands at the end of Wastwater, 
and going on to Crummock and Buttermere, for 
example. 

But at one time or another, during his thirty-five 
years as Inspector of Schools, he saw many sections of 
England, and had hardl}'^ a fixed abode till he took a 
London house — in Chester Square — in 1858, six years 
after his marriage. When he was in Cambridge at 
forty, he was so pleased that he made up his mind he 
would like the post of Master of Trinity ; but strolling 
back by moonlight from Grantchester made him 
melancholy " to think how at one time he was in the 
fields every summer evening of his life, and now it is 
such a rare event to find himself there." He remained 
something of a sportsman. Though he once said that 
he expected not to shoot again, and that " this will be 
no great blessing for the brute creation, as I never 
used to hit them," he continued at intervals to shoot 
at pheasants and to hit partridges. Fishing also kept 
him out of doors. Thus, he boated on the Wye from 
Goodrich Castle to Chepstow, and fished in places. 
Fishing helped to make him acquainted with the chalk 
downs about Dorking. Stopping at West Humble, 
Dorking, he says he almost agrees with Herman 
Merivale that between Box Hill and Leith Hill is the 
most enchanting country in England. Box Hill, he 
says, "comes down upon us like the side of Lough- 
rigg." For fishing he had the run of Wotton, Evelyn's 
Wotton, and caught two -pound trout there. The 
fishing was "a little too preserved and tame" for his 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 71 

taste, but he was delighted by the heath, pine, and 
whortleberries, of Leith Hill, and the immense view, 
and Wotton's Elizabethan quadrangle, "with two 
griffins keeping guard over the entrance, dogs lying 
on the grass-plot, and a charming medieval-sounding 
clock from the clock-tower," which made him feel in a 
dream. Off and on he knew that country for twenty 
years, and was never so much struck by it as when 
he saw it again on a visit from Cobham : 

" The parallel foldings, of which the Wotton folding 
is one, running up into the greensand knot of Leith 
Hill, are inexhaustible in beauty, and opposite to them 
is the sharp slope of the chalk hills. . . . They are 
the best chalk hills I know anywhere, the best 
wooded, and the most abounding in exquisite combs 
and bottoms. It has been a bad year for the bee 
orchis there, but the Pyramidalis we found covering 
the ground." 

M. E. Grant Duff had made him a bit of a botanist 
late in life, and he had gathered (Enothera about 
Oxwich Bay in Gower, and pellitory and Ruta 
muraria on walls at Coleridge's Ottery. His letters 
from Pain's Hill, Cobham, where he moved when he 
was fifty, abound in references to flowers and trees, 
chiefly in gardens. 

In fact, it is only at Cobham that Arnold can really 
be seen at home. He had spent some years at Harrow 
while his sons were at school, and we have glimpses 
of him looking on a wonderfully clear February day 
far off to " the clump of Botleys and the misty line 
of the Thames," driving to Belmount, walking with 
Rover in December in the fields beyond Northolt, 



^2 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

'* which are quiet and solemn in this grey weather 
beyond behef," finding violets with the children, and 
discussing whether the pigs shall really be fattened 
and killed for home use. But we see almost as much 
of him at Aston Clinton under the Chilterns, where 
he often stayed with the Rothschilds, shooting, and 
admiring the beechwoods, and finding white violets in 
masses in the lanes of the Chilterns. 

At Cobham the letters and the late poems really 
serve to fix him in one recognizable spot. ** We lay 
thee," he says to Geist, the dog — 

"We lay thee, close within our reach, 
Here, where the grass is smooth and warm, 
Between the holly and the beech, 
Where oft we watch'd thy couchant form, 

" Asleep, yet lending half an ear 
To travellers on the Portsmouth Road. ..." 

Cobham lies on the Portsmouth road, and across it, 

causing it to twist sharply. When Kaiser, the dog, 

dies, 

" the heavy news 
Post-haste to Cobham calls the Muse." 

Soon after moving there, he thought this country more 
beautiful than the Chilterns. The heather and pines 
pleased him, and especially the open land of St. George's 
Hill. And they began at once planting and improving, 
as if the cottage were their own, and they had a 
hundred years to live there ; " its great merit," he 
says, " is that it must have had nearly one hundred 
years of life already, and is surrounded by great old 
trees." The rhododendrons and roses and pampas 
grass, the strawberries and potatoes also, are his 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 73 

concern. He is uneasy in the dry weather for the 
hollies and laurels which have been moved. In short, 
after twelve years this country was pleasanter to him 
than Devonshire, near Exminster, and returning from 
there he remarks complacently to his son : " I think 
we are going to have a really great crop of pears and 
plums ; you know we have not had any to speak of 
hitherto. . . . The treatment consists in administer- 
ing guano while they are flowering ; this enables them 
to resist cold, and gives them strength to set their 
fruit." He had always leant towards gardens : now lilac 
and laburnum made " a heavenly moment of the year 
in England." The dogs fitted in perfectly. He tells 
Lucy, his daughter, how he came back from London 
at four and found the dogs dejected, not having had 
their walk. So he took them "the Burwood round," 
and at one place ** the cuckoo was so loud and so close 
that Max was fairly puzzled and stood still. At that 
moment a squirrel seemed to rise out of the ground at 
our feet, and ran up one of the trees. Kai strained 
and tugged, but I had him in the chain ; Max was so 
absorbed by the cuckoo that he never perceived the 
squirrel." He says that re-reading Wordsworth for 
the selection made him (in 1879) "feel more keenly 
than usual the beauty of the common incidents of 
the natural year." Driving home from dinner at 
Effingham he hears nightingales in "a thicket just 
before entering upon Effingham Common " ; "they were 
almost maddeningly beautiful." Again he hears them 
"along one of the old grass roads of this country, 
some thirty yards wide, leading from Bookham 
Common to Effingham Common, with woods on one 



74 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

side, and a great bowering hedge on the other." The 
weather could put him " in tearing spirits," he says, 
at sixty-four : 

" The east wind is gone, the south-west wind is come, 
and the thermometer is now (noon) 62 in shade to the 
north. The colour has come at last, and the horse- 
chestnuts and poplars are a sight. Yellows we can 
manage to perfection ; it is the reds in which the 
States beat us. . . . I go about the garden — I cannot 
come in to work — examine the acorns on the Turkey 
oak, with their curly -haired cups, which I never 
noticed before ; they are very effective. Then I give 
Flu [his wife], who is driving to Lady Ellesmere's, a 
Duchesse pear to take to Lady Ellesmere, who says 
she shall carry it to her gardener to show him how 
much finer pears are grown at the Cottage than at 
Burwood. . . ." 

He watches the abeles' " exquisitely light yellow " on 
an island in the Mole opposite, and walks along the 
Walton Road, where the plantations of chestnut and 
the fern "made a feast of brown and yellow." " I do 
enjoy this Surrey country and climate," he says in an 
April -like December thaw. When he was sixty - 
three he was skating on Pain's Hill Lake, which was 
"beautiful as ever" in snow and ice. At sixty-five 
he died. 

But all this has little to do with Arnold's poetry, 
except that it tells something of the experiences, tastes, 
and affections, that nourished his poetry. They did not 
always enter very directly into his poetry. The letters 
show that he enjoyed looking back and revisiting, as 
when he writes to his mother in 1848 about going along 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 75 

" that shelving gravelly road up towards Laleham " — 
walking up to Pentonhook after morning church, and 
finding " the stream with the old volume, width, shine, 
rapid fullness, ' kempshott,' and swans, unchanged and 
unequalled, to my partial and remembering eyes at 
least"; and again in 1849, about bathing with Tom 
Hughes in the Thames, ''having a header off the 
' kempshott ' where the lane from the village comes 
down on the river." But he allowed this sentiment to 
culminate in poetry rather seldom, and chiefly in " The 
Scholar Gipsy " and " Thyrsis." The Oxford country, 
in those poems, gathers to itself all of Arnold's feeling 
for country and garden. When he wrote " The Scholar 
Gipsy" he had already had a year or two of "an em- 
ployment which I certainly do not like"; the Oxford 
life was ten years clear behind him ; and in fact or in 
memory he had probably got up alone, as he did in 
October, 1854 (the year after "The Scholar Gipsy"), 
" into one of the little coombs that papa was so fond of, 
and which I had in my mind in * The Gipsy Scholar.' " 
He " felt the peculiar sentiment of this country and 
neighbourhood as deeply as ever." Seventeen years 
passed, and in another October he was telling his 
mother how the beautiful weather had been lighting 
up "the wood and stone of Oxfordshire — I say 'and 
stone ' because, to my mind, the yellows and browns 
of that oolite stone, which you may remember about 
Adderbury on the road to Oxford, make it one of the 
most beautiful things in the world." That was in i860. 
In May, 1863, he speaks of fine weather at Oxford "with 
a detestable cold wind." He had enjoyed it in spite of 
the wind, and sent his sister a fritillary ; but the cold 



•76 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

wind prevented him from beginning "a new poem 
about the Cumner hillside, and Clough in connexion 
with it," which he meant to have begun at Oxford — i.e.^ 
"Thyrsis." The poem, however, got written, and in 
1866 he told J. C. Shairp and his mother something 
about it. It had long been in his head " to connect 
Clough with that Cumner country," and Clough had 
an "idyllic side" which suited his "desire to deal 
again " with that country ; yet he felt strongly that, if 
the poem were read as a memorial poem, it would seem 
" that not enough is said about Clough in it," and he 
did not send it to Mrs. Clough. It is true. The poem 
is concerned entirely with Arnold and with what he 
used to love and what he has lost. He commemorates 
spring as much as Clough in verses like— 

" So some tempestuous morn in early June, 

When the year's primal burst of bloom is o'er, 
Before the roses and the longest day — 
When garden walks and all the grassy floor 
With blossoms red and white of fallen may • 
And chestnut flowers are strewn — 
So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry. 

From the wet field, through the vext garden-trees, 
Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze : 
The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I !" 

This is one of the best garden verses in English, and 
it happens that we know what garden suggested it. 
In 1864 he was at Woodford, in Epping Forest, and 
there he heard " the cuckoo I have brought in in 
* Thyrsis.'" Apparently the next two verses, 

" Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go ?'' 
and 

" He hearkens not ! light comer, he is flown !" 



MATTHEW ARNOLD T] 

were also " reminiscences of Woodford." But all was 
to be concentrated on Oxford, for which his feeling was 
abiding, and no doubt the two poems helped to pre- 
serve it and give it form. As late as 1884 he speaks 
of going out to Hinksey in October — again in October 
— and " up the hill to within sight of the Cumner firs," 
and of the indescribable effect which this landscape 
always has on him — " the hillside with its valleys, and 
Oxford in the great Thames valley below." 

In ** Thyrsis," the later poem, the garden and the 
sense of garden and cultivated land are very strong. 
Neither here nor in "The Scholar Gipsy" is there 
more than a graceful wildness and the idea of escape ; 
the pastoral convention in " Thyrsis " forbade it, and 
in any case the most real things are those 

" Groups under the dreaming garden-trees, 
And the full moon, and the white evening star." 

Such a line as 

" I know these slopes ; who knows them, if not I ?" 

has the effect of reducing the landscape to garden scale, 
while the feeling of 

" A fugitive and gracious light he seeks, 
Shy to illumine ; and I seek it too. 
This does not come with houses or with gold . . . 

helps to give the country a kind of allegorical thinness, 
as if it were chiefly a symbol of escape from the world 
of '* men and towns." 

But how often it is a garden in Arnold's poetry! 
His nightingale sings from a "moonlit cedar." The 



78 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

typical young man and woman in "The Youth of Man " 

are standing 

" where this grey balustrade 
Crowns the still valley ; behind 
Is the castled house, with its woods, 
Which shelter'd their childhood — the sun 
On its ivied windows ; a scent 
From the grey-wall'd gardens, a breath 
Of the fragrant stock and the pink. 
Perfumes the evening air. 
Their children play on the lawns. . . ." 

A certain smooth dignity of lawn and tree transferred 
him to classic ground. In Hyde Park, for example, while 

" The grass had still the green of May, 
And still the unblacken'd elms were gay . . ." 

the " soft couched cattle," he says, were as fair 

" As those which pastured by the sea, 
That old-world morn, in Sicily, 
When on the beach the Cyclops lay, 
And Galatea from the bay 
Mock'd her poor lovelorn giant's lay." 

" Scarce fresher," he says, " is the mountain sod " than 
the grass of Kensington Gardens ; and though he was 
" breathed on by the rural Pan " in his cradle, he could 
find peace there " for ever new." Longing himself to 
be such an islet as the gardens, he prays : 

" Calm soul of all things ! make it mine 
To feel, amid the city's jar. 
That there abides a peace of thine 
Man did not make, and cannot mar." 

So, to make an exit from this world into a scene for 
his ** Bacchanalia ; or. The New Age," he describes a 
typical rustic evening : 

" The tinkle of the thirsty rill, 
Unheard all day, ascends again. , . ." 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 79 

He observed detail beautifully, whether in wild or in 
cultivated country. Yet see how gentle he makes the 
wild in ** Iseult of Brittany," all unconsciously, by in- 
troducing Iseult and her children there as if on a sea- 
side holiday, the three in fur mantles, the children with 
" feathered hats," the mother telling them a story. It 
might have been " Iseult in Kensington Gardens," for 
all that the details are obviously taken from somewhere 

else: 

" The pale grass 
Is strewn with rocks, and many a shiver'd mass 
Of vein'd white-gleaming quartz, and here and there 
Dotted with holly- trees and juniper. 
In the smooth centre of the opening stood 
Three hollies side by side, and made a screen, 
Warm with the winter sun, of burnish'd green, 
With scarlet berries gemm'd, the fell-fare's food. 
Under the glittering hollies Iseult stands, 
Watching her children play ; their little hands 
Are busy gathering spars of quartz and streams 
Of stagshom for their hats ; anon, with screams 
Of mad delight they drop their spoils, and bound 
Among the holly clumps and broken ground. . . ." 

Probably he remembered seeing his own or a friend's 
children and such a stony ground, and remembered 
so well that the passage suggests a living Victorian 
lady more than an Arthurian ghostess. Finally, there 
is "Parting" in "Switzerland." He wishes to praise 
a clear buoyant voice, and asks : 

" Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn 
Lent it the music of its trees at dawn ?" 

Clearly this is one of the two or three things most 
loved by Arnold. In attempting to describe very 
different scenes, he gets the details true and close 



8o A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

enough, as in " Resignation," where he has a note 
saying that "those who have been long familiar with 
the English Lake-Country will find no difficulty in re- 
calling, from the description in the text, the roadside 
inn at Wythburn on the descent from Dunmail Raise 
towards Keswick ; its sedentary landlord . . . and the 
passage over the Wythburn Fells to Watendlath." 
But anybody who did not know would not find much 
help in these details towards reconstructing the scene. 
He is more effective when he uses a few strokes only, 
as in the beginning of " Rugby Chapel," where the 
field, the dank yellow drifts of leaves, the elms, the 
few shouts of boys playing, the lights coming out in 
the street, the chapel unlighted, suffice for any human 
being as such to call up something very like it, and for 
Rugbeians to call up Rugby. Nothing of its kind could 
be more effective than the simple scene with a few 
plain s3''mbols at the opening of " The Youth of Nature": 

" Raised are the dripping oars, 
Silent the boat ! the lake, 
Lovely and soft as a dream, 
Swims in the sheen of the moon. 
The mountains stand at its head, 
Clear in the pure June night, 
But the valleys are flooded with haze. 
Rydal and Fairfield are there ; 
In the shadow Wordsworth lies dead. 
So it is, so it will be for aye. 
Nature is fresh as of old, 
Is lovely ; a mortal is dead.' 

Though not a native of that country, he had looked 
at lake and mountain time after time since childhood, 
and they had a kind of moral or spiritual grandeur for 
him. Yet it was not onl)'^ to Nature that he looked for 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 8i 

calm after seeing in the country, for example, Cruik- 
shank's picture of " The Bottle "; not only to 

" Breathless glades, cheer'd by shy Dian's horn, 
Cold-bubbling springs, or caves," 

but equally to Wordsworth, or to some other human 
mind, who heard their voices "right," and interpreted 
the calm and the majesty and gave them moral or 
spiritual significance. 



WILLIAM MORRIS 

IT is perhaps absurd to speak of William Morris's 
country if one means more than that he spent great 
tracts of his life, working and seeing friends, at Kelm- 
scott House in Hammersmith, and Kelmscott Manor 
House on the Upper Thames. He was born in Essex, 
at Elm House, Walthamstow, from which the family 
moved when he was six to Woodford Hall in the same 
county. When he was fourteen they moved back to 
Walthamstow, to Water House. These houses were 
on the edge of Epping Forest. Marlborough, at the 
edge of Savernake Forest, was his school ; Oxford his 
University, where he met Burne-Jones, Swinburne, 
Rossetti, and wrote his early poems. Then he lived in 
London for a time, first at 17, Red Lion Square with 
Burne-Jones, and then, for a time after his marriage, 
at 41, Great Ormond Street. Five years, from i860 to 
1865, he spent at the house built for him by Philip 
Webb, the Red House at Bexley Heath in Kent. He 
took to London again to be nearer his business, and 
Bloomsbury was again his choice ; but now he had a 
home in Queen Square instead of lodgings. There he 
wrote " The Life and Death of Jason " and much of 
"The Earthly Paradise." After six years in London 
he moved, in 187 1, to Kelmscott Manor House. He did 
most of his work there or in the house which he called 

82 



WILLIAM MORRIS 83 

Kelmscott House, facing the Thames at Hammersmith, 
or in his factory at Merton Abbey on the Wandle, a 
few miles away across the river. He died at Kelmscott 
Flouse in 1896, when he was sixty-two. 

Miss May Morris's notes to the Collected Edition, 
coupled with Mr, Mackail's life, show us the man very 
plainly — his poetry " dropping off the end of his pen," 
his dyeing stuffs, his printing, his illuminating, his 
public meetings against the unspeakable Turk, his 
letters against the unspeakable Sir Gilbert Scott, and 
then, in August, a letter to his wife saying that he is 
coming down to Kelmscott : " Please tell May to 
have many worms ready for me: proper brandlings 
I must have ; they are striped and don't smell nice — 
this is their sign . . ." and there is a reminder, 
" Don't forget the wormsy This was in 1877, while 
Morris was at work on "Sigurd the Volsung," 
Miss Morris adds that she also understood gentles, and 
remembers her pride in not refusing to manipulate 
this interesting bait when desired by the fisherman, 
her father. 

Morris did not use his experience directly : " Sigurd" 
contains no allusion to coarse fishing. In fact, a man 
undertaking to reconstruct the poet and his environ- 
ment from his poems would have need of a long life. 
The prose tells us a little more. *' News from No- 
where " is saved, if at all, by what comes straight from 
Morris's experience of the Thames and of Thames side 
houses at Kelmscott and Hammersmith. The water is 
real water, whereas the people and that decorated 
tobacco pipe are not real at all. The elms on the bank, 
the cuckoo's song, the blackbird's "sweet strong 



84 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

whistle," the corncrake's craking, the "waves of 
fragrance from the flowering clover amidst the ripe 
grass " — these also are real, and so is the outside of 
the house (he had too little skill, perhaps, in drawing 
people to do the inside): 

"The garden between the wall and the house was 
redolent of the June flowers, and the roses were rolling 
over one another with that delicious superabundance of 
small well-tended gardens which at first sight takes 
away all thought from the beholder save that of beauty. 
The blackbirds were singing their loudest, the doves 
were cooing on the roof-ridge, the rooks in the high 
elm-trees beyond were garrulous among the young 
leaves, and the swifts wheeled whining about the 
gables. And the house itself was a fit guardian for all 
the beauty of this heart of summer." 

At Kelmscott he was often and for long happy. He 
could work there. He had his wife and daughters and 
friends there. The river held fish. The dung bred 
brandlings, and Miss Morris gathered them. The sun 
shone frequently, and if the wind blew east it would 
change in the end to south-west. Moreover, he 
delighted very much in " the works of the Thames-side 
country bumpkins," the farmhouses with flowers in the 
parlour, and the village churches around, " every one a 
beautiful work of art." Oxford was not far off, and he 
knew the country lying between. Miss Morris tells us 
that the palace of " The Well at the World's End " was 
their own Kelmscott, that Wilstead was Faringdon, and 
so on. Miss Morris's notes include extracts from diaries 
which show us Morris dividing his time among friends, 
fishing, and romance. She thus enables us to taste 
the same mixture as her father did in 1892. If only 



WILLIAM MORRIS 85 

this were possible from beginning to end of the 
romances, more would read them, all would love them. 
It is a pleasure to see Morris in the country, and to 
see more of that love of the earth which his poetry 
reveals less directly. He, too, loved the chalk hills 
which he had trodden when he walked about Marl- 
borough and Avebury, and round Oxford. So that 
in 1879, August 19, when he was driving over Salis- 
bury Plain, and had stopped at the George at Ames- 
bury, he said he wished that he could live on the 
Plain, since he could not live in Iceland. He loved 
gardens also. For most of his life he had about him 
beautiful gardens, as at Walthamstow, Oxford, Bexley 
Heath, and Kelmscott. Water House, Walthamstow 
— and Woodford Hall was similar, but larger — had a 
square hall with a marble pavement, and a broad stair- 
case of Spanish chestnut leading up out of it to an upper 
hall or gallery ; and Morris read in the window-seats 
when he was home from Marlborough and Oxford : 

'* Behind the house was a broad lawn, and beyond 
it the feature which gave the house its name — a moat 
of some forty feet in breadth, surrounding an island 
planted with a grove of aspens. The moat was stocked 
with pike and perch ; there the boys fished, bathed, 
and boated, in summer, and skated in winter. The 
island, rough and thickly wooded and fringed with a 
growth of hollies, hawthorns, and chestnuts, was a sort 
of fairyland for all the children, who almost lived in it." 

House, moat, and garden, I suppose, helped to give 

what reality there is to " Golden Wings ": 

" Midways of a walled garden, 
In the happy poplar land. 
Did an ancient castle stand, 
With an old knight for a warden. 



86 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

" Many scarlet bricks there were 
In its walls, and old grey stone, 
Over which red apples shone 
At the right time of the year. 

" On the bricks the green moss grew, 
Yellow lichen on the stone, 
Over which red apples shone ; 
Little war that castle knew. 

" Deep green water fiU'd the moat. . . ." 

These things he had seen at Walthamstow and 
Woodford, and "the red-bill'd moorhen," and 

" White swans on the green moat, 
Small feathers left afloat 
By the blue-painted boat ; 
Swift running of the stoat. . . ." 

That same moat was good enough to girdle Troy, and 
through the long war 

" the carp and tench, 
In spite of arblasts and petrarias, 
Suck at the floating lilies all day long." 

And there is very little of English country in his 
poems which could not have come from those Essex 
gardens, Epping Forest, and the downs and forest 
near Marlborough. 

Yet Mr. Stopford Brooke has said that " No tongue 
can tell how Morris loved the Earth ; she was his 
delight, his joy, his refuge, his home ; the companion 
of his uncompanionable thoughts ; his mother from 
whose breasts he drank life, energy, food for his work, 
joy for his imagination, and incessant beauty. No one 
has praised her better ; and his poetry of Nature 
reveals how close, how passionate, he was in his 



WILLIAM MORRIS 87 

worship." There is a humanity of this world in 
Morris's feehng for Nature, with which Wordsworth's 
cannot be compared. Except a few of the greatest 
things by Whitman, hterature in the English tongue 
hardly shows another earth-feeling so majestic and 
yet so tender as in " The Message of the March 
Wind." Elsewhere Morris showed himself aware that 
troubling about arts and crafts might seem " petty 
and unheroic" to those who were brought face to face 
with "the reckless hideousness and squalor of a 
great manufacturing district." He cared for the arts 
and for the " shabby hell " of the city, and did not 
think or find the two cases incompatible, but rather 
that they were one, though his crowded life — busy, 
never hurried, and of no unusual length — was too 
small for his purpose. A division between the two 
cases is apparent in " The Message of the March 
Wind," where the lover at evening asks his mistress : 

" Shall we be glad always ? Come closer and hearken : 
Three fields farther on, as they told me down there, 
When the young moon has set, if the March sky should darken, 
We might see from the hill-top the great city's glare." 

But the division is healed in a union between love of 
one woman and of the w^orld, and the lover ends : 

" But lo, the old inn, and the lights, and the fire, 

And the fiddler's old tune and the shuffling of feet ; 
Soon for us shall be quiet and rest and desire. 
And to-morrow's uprising to deeds shall be sweet." 

The scene is a kind of symbol of the union in 
Morris of love for countr}^ and love for town. In 
Mr. Mackail's Life he is sometimes revealed as a hearty 
countryman and as a conscious and satisfied Cockney. 



88 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

A Cockney was what he tended to prefer calling him- 
self, as a citizen working in the town which was once 
" London small and white and clean." As an artist he 
preferred to think of such a London, and he achieved 
it by looking back in " The Earthly Paradise," and 
forward in " News from Nowhere." But the union 
was an imperfect one. For most of his life he was 
a somewhat dismayed countryman, but an imperfect 
Londoner. Probably he was one of those survivors 
who cannot accept the distinction and division between 
town and country which has been sharpening ever 
since 

" London was a grey- walled town, 
And slow the pack-horse made his way 
Across the curlew-haunted down." 

He passed from one to the other easily. In both he 
worked and met his friends, artists and Socialists. 

No man yet has made a perfect harmony of the two, 
town and country, and we know nothing about the 
angels. A man at least has done very well who, 
either on the Oxfordshire or the Middlesex shore, 
wrote two or three kinds of poetry and prose, lectured, 
organized societies and movements, designed wall- 
paper and chintz, wove tapestry and got others to 
weave it, dyed and experimented in dyeing, managed 
a business and kept a shop, was a public examiner 
and an adviser to a museum, refused the laureate- 
ship, caught perch and jack, cooked admirably, and 
had times when he was " too happy to think that 
there could be much amiss anywhere." 



THE DOWNS AND THE SOUTH COAST 

AUBREY WHITE 

COBBETT HAZLITT 

JEFFERIES HARDY 
BELLOC 



JOHN AUBREY 

JOHN AUBREY was a gossip whose odds and 
ends about men, things, and places, are now better 
than most full-dress literature. Those about men 
were set down at first merely as material for a bio- 
grapher whom he thought his better, Anthon}^ a Wood, 
and, as he was inquisitive and precise, there were some 
strange things amongst them, so that he said they were 
*' not fit to let fly abroad till about thirty years hence, 
for the author and the persons (like medlars) ought to 
be first rotten," They were *' put in writing tumultu- 
arily," and he fancied himself "all along discoursing" 
with Wood. The " Brief Lives " will now survive what- 
ever is made out of them. So with his observations 
of antiquities and natural histor}^ Who but Aubrey 
would have noticed and entered in a book that in the 
spring after the Fire of London "all the ruins were 
overgrown with an herb or two, but especially with a 
yellow flower, Ericolevis Neapolitana''? Who but he 
would have included this in a sketched life of Thomas 
Hobbes ? — " Though he left his native county [Wilt- 
shire] at fourteen, and lived so long, yet sometimes one 
might find a little touch of our pronunciation — old Sir 
Thomas Malette, one of the judges of the King's Bench, 
knew Sir Walter Ralegh, and sayd that, notwithstand- 
ing his great travells, conversation, learning, etc., yet 
he spake broad Devonshire to his dying day." 

91 



92 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

He began early in Wiltshire, as a boy at Easton 
Pierse, in the parish of Kington St. Michael, at Leigh 
Delamere, where the Vicar taught him, and at Blandford 
Grammar School in Dorset. For example, he remem- 
bered that " our old Vicar of Kington St. Michael, Mr. 
Hynd, did sing his sermons rather than read them," 
and how " when I was a boy, before the late civil wars, 
the tabor and pipe were commonly used, especially 
Sundays and Holydays, and at Christenings and Feasts, 
in the Marches of Wales, Hereford, Gloucestershire, 
and in all Wales," and " how the water in the ditches 
below Devizes looks bluish " at the fall of the leaf 
When a boy, too, he heard from the old men how "in one 
of the great fields at Warminster in Wiltshire, in the 
harvest, at the very time of the fight at Bosworth field, 
between King Richard III. and Henry VII., there was 
one of the parish took two sheaves, crying (with some 
intervals) now for Richard, now for Henry ; at last lett 
fall the sheaf that did represent Richard and cried now 
for King Henry, Richard is slain." Coming to write of 
Sir Philip Sidney, he recalled : " When I was a boy nine 
years old, I was with my father at one Mr. Singleton's* 
an alderman and woollen-draper in Gloucester, who had 
in his parlour, over the chimney, the whole description 
of the funeral, engraved and printed on papers pasted 
together, and which, at length, was, I believe, the length 
of the room at least ; but he had contrived it to be 
turned upon two pins, that turning one of them made 
the figures march all in order. It did make such a 
strong impression on my young phantasy, that I re- 
member it as if it were but yesterday. I could never 
see it elsewhere. The house is in the great long street, 



JOHN AUBREY 93 

over against the high steeple ; and 'tis hkely it remains 
there still. 'Tis pity it is not redone." At Blandford 
he had Walter and Tom Raleigh, grand-nephews of Sir 
Walter, for schoolfellows — clever boys, proud and 
quarrelsome, with "excellent tunable voices, and played 
their parts well on the viol." 

Perhaps the memento of Sidney's funeral and the 
talk of the Raleighs at Blandford turned him to a sense 
of the living past and dying present. But an old 
family, with a strong Welsh element, that had already 
been some generations in North Wiltshire, would of 
itself have provided much for the taste which we must 
suppose him born with. His mother's father had been 
born also at Easton Pierse, his mother in the neigh- 
bouring parish of Yatton Keynell. Thomas Danvers, 
one of his uncles, was at Bemerton when George 
Herbert was buried there " (according to his own 
desire) with the singing service for the burial of the 
dead, by the singing men of Sarum." Thomas Browne, 
his great-uncle, remembered Sir Philip Sidney, ** and 
said that he was often wont, as he was hunting on our 
pleasant plains, to take his table book out of his pocket, 
and write down his notions as they came into his head, 
when he was writing his Arcadia." When a boy, he 
says, "he did ever love to converse with old men as 
living histories," and began to draw, yet never became 
a painter. Thus he grew up a lover of the old days, 
when lords of manors kept good houses and ate at the 
high tables in the oriels of their "great Gothic halls," 
such as Draycot, when the halls of justices of the peace 
were "dreadful to behold, the screens were gar- 
nished with corslets and helmets, gaping with open 



94 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

mouth, with coats of mail, lances, pikes, halberts, 
brown bills, batterdashers, bucklers," and " the meet- 
ing of the gentry was not at tippling-houses, but in the 
fields or forest, with their hawks and hounds, with 
their bugle horns in silken baldrics." All about him 
were old men to furnish him from the past. John 
Power, for example, an undergraduate of Gloucester 
Hall in the early seventeenth century, told Aubrey 
what an old college servant had told him about Thomas 
Allen the astrologer, that sometimes he met the spirits 
coming up his stairs "like bees." There was a great- 
nephew of this Allen, too, at Broad Hinton, on the 
other side of Wootton Bassett from Easton Pierse. 
One Jack Sydenham, who used to carry Aubrey in his 
arms and "sang rarel3^" had formerly served Thomas 
Bushell, of Enston in Oxfordshire, and remembered a 
workman discovering a rock there, " with pendants 
like icicles as at Wookey Hole (Somerset), which was 
the occasion of making that delicate grotto and those 
fine walks." Moreover, this same Jack Sydenham had 
served a neighbour of the Aubreys, Sir Charles Snell, 
of Kington St. Michael, who had built a ship, the Angel 
Gabriel, for Sir Walter Raleigh's Guiana design, and 
had paid for it with his manor of Yatton Keynell, the 
farm at Easton Pierse, Thornhill, and the church lease 
of Bishop's Cannings. Aubrey had met, too, a Wor- 
cestershire man from whom Raleigh permanently 
borrowed a gown at Oxford. Then, at Draycot Cerne 
the Longs lived, and Sir Walter Long had first brought 
tobacco into "our part of North Wilts, e.g. Malmesbury 
Hundred." The old yeomen of the neighbourhood 
told him how, when they went to market at Malmesbury 



JOHN AUBREY 95 

or Chippenham, having to pay for tobacco its weight 
in silver, ''they called out their biggest shillings to 
lay in the scales against the tobacco." History and 
tradition flowed naturally to Aubrey. The country 
tradition that Cardinal Morton was a shoemaker's 
son from Bere in Dorset came to him while he was a 
schoolboy at Blandford. He was only eight when he 
first saw Stonehenge. How many thousands had 
seen it at that age and forgotten it, or never said so, 
just as they must have known once, as well as Aubrey, 
that "in North Wilts the milkmaids sing as shrill and 
clear as any swallow sitting on a barn." He quotes 
Chaucer. The wonders of the living world also were 
very great. He had seen with his own eyes, or some 
Jack or Jill had made him see, a whirlwind carry a 
child, with half the haycock where he had been lying, 
up over the elm-trees and down safe "in the next 
ground." 

He was soon to know South Wiltshire almost as well 
as North. Perhaps his road to the school at Blandford 
took him past Stonehenge ; for he cannot have been 
much above eight when lessons at Leigh Delamere, "a 
mile's fine walk " or pony-ride from home, were ex- 
changed for an ordinary school, the good-natured Rector 
who had taught Hobbes for an ill-natured school- 
master. To reach Blandford he must at any rate have 
crossed Salisbury Plain, the whole breadth of it, three 
of its rivers, and the ranges dividing them. Then when 
he was only sixteen, in 1642, and was sent for from 
Oxford to avoid the war, it was to Broad Chalk he went 
instead of to Easton Pierse. His father was renting 
the Manor Farm there, close to the third of those three 



96 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

rivers, the Ebble. The father "was not educated to 
learning, but to hawking," and as the boy had been 
allured to reading by the '* Religio Medici " in 1643, and 
" in those days fathers were not acquainted with their 
children," it was in some ways a " most sad " life. But 
he was made a complete Wiltshireman. Years later, 
when he stated that the Wiltshire greyhounds were the 
best in England, he added that he and his father had "as 
good as any were in our times in Wiltshire," and that 
they were generally fallow, or black, or black and white. 
Between the country about Easton Pierse and that about 
Broad Chalk he felt great differences. North Wiltshire, 
where they only milked cows and made cheese, and fed 
chiefly on milk meats, " which cools the brains and 
hurts the invention," made the people "melancholy, 
contemplative and malicious," loving religion and liti- 
gation ; but in the South, on the Downs, where most is 
tillage, " their flesh is hard, their bodies strong : being 
weary after hard labour, they have not leisure to read 
and contemplate religion, but go to bed to their rest, to 
rise betime the next morning to their labour." The 
lesser differences were strange. For example, his 
books gathered more mould on their bindings in the 
hill country at Chalk than in the vale at Easton. Then, 
again, some of the high-lying places, like Peatwood, 
that might have been thought healthy, were not so; 
they were constantly in mist ; people did not live long 
there. 

Apparently Broad Chalk became Aubrey's home on 
his fathers death early in the fifties of the century. He 
lived there mostly, but sometimes at Easton; his mother 
died there in 1685, but was taken to Kington St. Michael 



JOHN AUBREY 97 

to be buried. What with the family estates in Hereford- 
shire and Breconshire, he was bound to be a traveller. 
Much of his time, says he, was spent journeying to 
South Wales and Herefordshire. In the end litigation 
lost him ever3'thing but his friends, yet he still loved 
travelling. The homeless man wished that the monas- 
teries had not been put down ; it was fit that there should 
be "receptacles and provision for contemplative men." 
*' What a pleasure 'twould have been," he exclaimed, 
** to have travelled from monastery to monastery !" He 
was crossed often in love, too. But even Joan Sumner, 
one of his least propitious ladies, led him to another 
part of Wiltshire, to Seend, near Melksham, where he 
discovered chalybeate springs. If it had not been for 
the jealousy of the Bath doctors, he thought he 
might have made the place another Bath. Even so, 
the village could not contain the company visiting the 
springs, and building was afoot. 

Thus with all his misfortunes it was a happy life to 
look back on, sketching antiquities on horseback ; spy- 
ing ** Our Lady's Church steeple at Sarum like a fine 
Spanish needle " when he topped Red Horn Hill 
above Urchfont ; seeing the distant mountains of Devon 
gleaming white with May snow, while where he stood at 
Llanrechid in Glamorganshire scarce any had fallen ; 
and, above all, suddenly discovering the grey wethers 
— the grey stones scattered sheep-like over the slopes 
— on Marlborough Downs, and the great temple of 
Avebury. The grey wethers were then much thicker 
than now over the downs between Marlborough and 
Avebury, and looked like the scene "where the giants 
fought with huge stones against the gods, as is described 
7 



98 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

by Hesiod in his Theogonia." Aubrey was twenty- 
two when he first saw that country. 

" I never saw the country about Marlborough (he 
says) till Christmas, 1648, being then invited to Lord 
Francis Seymour's by the Hon. Mr. Charles Seymour. 
. . . The morrow after twelfth-day Mr. Charles Sey- 
mour and Sir William Button met with their packs of 
hounds at the Grey Wethers. These Downs look as if 
they were sown with great stones, very thick, and in a 
dusky evening they look like a flock of sheep .... 'Twas 
here that our game began, and the chase led us at length 
through the village of Avebury into the closes there, 
where I was wonderfully surprised at the sight of those 
vast stones, of which I had never heard before, as also 
at the mighty bank and graffe about it. I observed in 
the enclosures some segments of rude circles made with 
these stones, whence I concluded they had been in the 
old time complete. I left my company awhile, enter- 
taining myself with a more delightful indagation, and 
then (cheered by the cry of the hounds) overtook the 
company, and went with them to Kennet, where was a 
good hunting dinner provided." 

Nobody before, it seems, had noticed the stones at 
Avebury, or had troubled to say so, and Aubrey 
naturally boasted that they excelled Stonehenge ** as 
a cathedral does a parish church." Afterwards he 
showed them to Charles II., who had heard the boast. 
And he loved to revisit them. When he came there 
hawking with Long, of Draycot Cerne, he wrote in 
elevation : 

" Our sport was very good and in a romantic country, 
for the prospects are noble and vast, the downs stocked 
with numerous flocks of sheep, the turf rich and fra- 



JOHN AUBREY 99 

grant with thyme and burnet . . . nor are the nut- 
brown shepherdesses without their graces. ..." 

He must have dehghted in high places, like the top 
of Chalk Down, with its oaks " shorn by the south and 
south-west winds," reclining from the sixteen-miles- 
distant sea, and the top of Knoll Hill, near Kilmington 
and Maiden Bradley, that gave a prospect of the Fosse- 
way between Cirencester and Gloucester, forty miles 
off; also the Isle of Wight, Salisbury steeple, and the 
Severn sea. When he has to tell the story of a prac- 
tical joke at Marlborough, he cannot omit to picture his 
young blades " walking on the delicate fine downs at 
the backside of the town." And what a pretty thing 
that is in the brief life of George Feriby, parson of 
Bishop's Cannings, near Devizes, " an excellent musi- 
cian and no ill poet " I — how he entertained Queen 
Anne at Wansdyke, on the top of the down, with a 
pleasant pastoral, " his fellow songsters in shepherds 
weeds and bagpipes, he himself like an old bard," and 
King James " with carters singing with whips in their 
hands ; and afterwards, a football play." Bishop's Can- 
nings, he says, " would have challenged all England 
for music, [bell-]ringing, and football play." He went 
everywhere. He went to Chitterne, which is not in 
any of the books, and remarks that tobacco-pipe clay 
is " excellent, or the best in England, at Chitterne, of 
which the Gauntlet pipes at Amesbury are made by 
one of that name." He heard the gossip of towns and 
villages, the dreams that came true at Broad Chalk 
and Amesbury. Everywhere to the last he had friends : 
his chief virtue, he said himself, was gratitude. 



100 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

At Kilmington his friend Francis Potter was Rector, 
a Wiltshireman like himself, born at Mere under Castle 
Hill and, like Aubrey, a lover of clear-cut chalk hills, 
such as Cley Hill, near Warminster, and the Knolls. 
" He took great delight in Knoll Hill," says Aubrey. 
This man became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He 
" had an admirable mechanical invention," and made 
quadrants with a graduated compass — his own inven- 
tion. Above the well at the parsonage, which was very 
deep, was the most ingenious and useful contrivance 
Aubrey had ever seen, for emptying the vast bucket 
without a strain. He wrote an ** Interpretation of the 
Number 666." It was a pity, says Aubrey, that he was 
" staked to a private preferment in an obscure corner," 
to contract moss " like an old pole in an orchard." But 
Aubrey had never enjoyed anywhere else " such phil- 
osophical and hearty entertainment " as at Kilmington. 
He describes the old man like a monk, " pretty long- 
visaged," with " pale clear skin " and grey eye, talking 
" all new and unvulgar," his house undecked as a monk's 
cell, but with a " pretty contrived garden," " all fortified 
(as you may say) and adorned " with the finest of box 
hedges. On the other side of the old westward road 
lies Stourton, home of the Stourtons, of whom Aubrey 
has a story. The seventh Baron, like the other old 
peers, envied the upstart Herbert of Wilton, Lord 
Pembroke, and as he passed Wilton House on his way 
to or from Salisbury his retainers sounded trumpets 
and gave " reproachful challenging words" : which was, 
says Aubrey, " a rehque of knighthood errantry." This 
Lord Stourton was executed for murder in 1557. Still 
farther away from Kilmington, at Gillinghara, Edward 



JOHN AUBREY loi 

Davenant, once Vicar, is buried. He lent Aubrey j^Soo 
for a year and a half and would take no interest. Chris- 
topher Wren said of him that he " was the best mathe- 
matician in the world about thirty or thirty-five years 
ago." For a time he was parson also at Poulshot, near 
Seend. Aubrey's " most familiar learned acquaintance 
was Lancelot Morehouse, parson of Pertwood," which 
is eight miles east of Kilmington, high up above the 
old west road, and near the west end of the Great 
Ridge Wood. He had been curate at Broad Chalk. 
He wrote against the Vicar of Kilmington's book on the 
number 666 and was answered " with some sharpness." 
Also he wrote on squaring the circle. It was apropos 
of Pertwood that Aubrey mentioned the mists on the 
downs. But Morehouse died at Little Langford on 
the Wylye whither he was preferred. He left " his 
many excellent mathematical notes to his ingenious 
friend, John Grant, of Hindon," two miles south of 
Pertwood. Two miles from Hindon, Christopher 
Wren was born, in the parsonage at East Knoyle. 

These people shared sorne of Aubrey's tastes, but the 
greater and better part of his material related to more 
outstanding men and women, like Philip Sidney and 
his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, at Wilton. 
There were the Raleighs at Downton, and a portrait 
of the great Sir Walter " in a white satin doublet, 
all embroidered with rich pearls, and a mighty rich 
chain of pearls about his neck, and the old servants have 
told me that the pearls were near as big as the painted 
ones." At Becket Park, Shrivenham, just over the 
Berkshire border, in the Vale of White Horse, lived 
Henry Martin, of whom Aubrey says that he was " as 



102 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

far from a Puritan as light from darkness " ; and that 
when he had been caught asleep in the House of 
Commons, and a motion brought that such scandalous 
members be put out, he said : ** Mr. Speaker, a motion 
has been to turn out the N odder s ; I desire the Noddees 
may also be turned out." 

West Lavington was the home of Sir John Danvers, 
who married Donne's Magdalen Herbert, mother of 
George Herbert and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. At 
West Lavington, too, Aubrey " enjoyed the contentment 
of solitude " in the Earl of Abingdon's walks and gardens, 
while he arranged his Miscellanies. The Buttons, with 
whom he went hunting to Avebury, lived at Tocken- 
ham. With their neighbours, the Longs of Draycot 
Cerne, he stayed frequently when he was homeless. 
Sir James had been swordsman, horseman, falconer, 
extemporaneous orator, and naturalist, a Cavalier, but 
suspected by " strict " Cavaliers because Cromwell 
" fell in love with his company and commanded him to 
wear his sword, and to meet him a-hawking." Dorothy, 
his wife, was " a most elegant beauty and wit." From 
Doll, their daughter, afterwards Lady Heron, Aubrey 
quotes the saying that " Poets and bravos have punks 
to their mothers," when he speaks of a love affair of 
Raleigh's. 

Gratitude, hero-worship, curiosity, love-making, and 
litigation, left Aubrey no time to make more than 
notes : he could not finish nearly all his sentences. 
"While hiding from the bailiffs in 167 1 at Broad 
Chalk," says his editor, Mr. Andrew Clark, Aubrey 
began a rustic comedy, the characters ladies and gentle- 
men, courtly and old-fashioned, drunken and insolent, 



JOHN AUBREY 103 

and sow-gelders, carters, dairymaids, and gipsies, and 
a clergyman whom James Long had hunted " dryfoot 
to the alehouse with his pack of hounds, to the great 
grief of the revered divine " — " one of the old red- 
nosed clergy, orthodox and canonical." " In several 
cases, over the initials of his dramatis personce, Aubrey 
has jotted the names or initials of the real persons he 
was copying." The scene was to be Christian Malford 
green, a little east of Draycot Cerne and Kington St. 
Michael, 

But either the bailiffs found him, or he went fishing 
in the pond where the Chalk Bourn rises. The play 
was not finished. There were ** no better trouts in the 
kingdom of England," said Aubrey, than in his pond 
at Naule. And off he went to Draycot or Easton. He 
hoped that some " public-spirited young Wiltshire 
man" would polish and complete his ''natural re- 
marques." Yet he lived to reach seventy-one, having 
just published his " Miscellanies," and dedicated them 
to the Earl of Abingdon. He died at Oxford on his 
travels in 1697, and was buried there, in St. Mary 
Magdalene's Church, undistinguished by tablet or 
inscription. 



GILBERT WHITE 

THE Whites were an Oxfordshire and Hampshire 
family. Gilbert White's country was the country 
of his birth, his life, his book, and of his death. He 
travelled much about Southern England, but always 
to or from Selborne in Hampshire. Charles II. 
knighted a Sampson White, who was Mayor of Ox- 
ford, a mercer and a fool. This Sampson's son, Gilbert, 
became a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and, in 
1681, Vicar of Selborne, and he left money for the pur- 
chase of land of which the rents were partly to supply 
the Selborne children with instruction in reading, 
writing, saying prayers, knitting, and sewing, partly to 
provide for the improvement of Honey Lane, the rocky, 
hollow lane from Oakhanger to the village. John 
White, son of this Gilbert, a barrister-at-law and 
justice of the peace, married a Sussex woman, Anne 
Holt, and their eldest son, our Gilbert White, was 
born in his grandfather's house, the Vicarage at Sel- 
borne, in 1720. As a child he lived at Compton, near 
Guildford, and at East Harting in Sussex, and was at 
Basingstoke Grammar School, and probably also at 
Farnham Grammar School ; but he was only ten when 
his father settled finally in Selborne at " The Wakes." 
Before he was twelve, he planted an oak and an ash in 
his father's garden. When he was sixteen he noticed 

104 



GILBERT WHITE 105 

the northward flying of wild-geese on March 31, and 
the coming of the cuckoo on April 6. As a schoolboy 
he took to Basingstoke, together with " The Whole 
Duty of Man," Cicero's Letters, Virgil, Homer, 
Isocrates, Tacitus, Sallust, and other books, a copy 
of Thomson's "Seasons." We, who know what he 
became, have only these things upon which to feed 
our fancy about his childhood in remote Selborne, cut 
off from the world by obscurity and difficult and ill- 
kept roads. 

In 1740 he entered Oriel College. At Oxford he 
shot, he rode, he listened to music, how much is not 
known, and he made a friendship with one John 
Mulso, an Oriel contemporary, which lasted until 1791. 
In 1743 he took his bachelor's degree, but he went up 
to Oxford again with his dog and his gun, and in the 
next year was elected a Fellow of his college. Mulso 
writes to him and asks after " Jenny " and " the Stam- 
fordian," advises him not to play so much with " the 
tangles of Neasra's hair," and wants confirmation ot 
the report that he is to marry. He was frequently 
going to and fro between Selborne and Oxford. His 
love of the South Country is clear in his correspon- 
dence. Mulso tells him of the partridges he has seen 
when afield, and wishes that White had been there ; 
he speaks of White's love for "cool brown days " ; and 
he thinks, from White's letters describing his travels, 
that his friend is " a great and masterly hand " at land- 
scape-painting in words. " I never," wrote Mulso in 
one letter — " I never see a spot which lies much out 
of the level but I think of you, and say, ' Now this 
would please White.'" From the letters of Mulso it 



io6 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

is easy to see that White was a man of original 
character, with a humour and a turn of speaking all 
his own. He was much out of doors in many parts of 
England, on visits of business or friendship and sport 
in Devon, Northampton, Bedfordshire, Essex, Kent, 
Surrey, Sussex, Wiltshire, and Oxfordshire. He 
travelled and noticed so much that his friend begged 
him to make a useful book out of his observations, and 
so " enable young men to travel with taste and improve 
at home." White's character, as it appeared in his 
letters and in her brother's talk, seems to have de- 
lighted Hester Mulso, afterwards Mrs. Chapone, who 
was seven years younger than he; and Mulso often 
mentions her in his letters, playfully and very likely 
with a feeling that she might one day marry his friend. 
The naturalist enjoyed her society, wrote to her, sent 
his " Invitation to Selborne," but from her playful sig- 
nature of "Yes Papa," and the tone of Mulso's letter at 
the time of her marriage with Chapone, it is almost 
certain that White had not been deeply moved. His 
nature, genial, self-centred, slow, perhaps phlegmatic, 
was not disturbed. His one show of passion came 
when he said that Pennant did not behave " like a 
gentleman." While still in his youth he was methodi- 
cal, calm, with a temperament already quite precipi- 
tated, it appears. He was minute and business-like, 
for example, in looking over some family estates in 
Essex in 1764, just as many years later he was shrewd 
and hard in writing of a debatable will, by which it 
was uncertain whether he or a hospital would profit. 
There is, indeed, a hint of dissatisfaction in Mulso's 
letter to him saying : ** I sincerely wish you had a 



GILBERT WHITE lo; 

living like Deane, and the thorough good sort of 
damoiselle that you mention, that your wishes might be 
completed"; but certainly he was living within his 
income, saving and investing. 

In 1747 he received deacon's orders and became 
curate to an uncle at Swanaton, but he was still often 
at Oriel, where he had small-pox in the same year, and 
perhaps gave only Sundays to his curacy. In 175 1 he 
was curate to Dr. Bristow, Vicar of Selborne, and the 
next year Proctor of Oxford University and Dean of 
Oriel. But a letter from Mulso in 1750 suggests that 
he was getting tired of Oxford ways, though he was 
still shooting and sociable. 

It was in 1747 that he bought Philip Miller's 
" Gardening Dictionary," his first purchase of the kind, 
and in 1751 that he began the "Garden Kalendar," a 
diary of seed-sowing, weather, planting, etc., which he 
kept going until his death, in this style : 

" 1759, May I. — Pulled away the hedge round the 
fir-quincunx, and hoed the ground clean. 

" 2. — The Hanger out in full leaf; but much banged 
about by the continual strong east wind that has blown 
for many days. The buds and blossoms of all trees 
much injured by the winds. The ground parched and 
bound very hard. The cold air keeps the nightingale 
very silent. No vegetation seems to stir at present. 
Disbudded some of the vines. The buds are about an 
inch long. 

" 3. — Made second annual bed with six barrows of 
grass and weeds only ; no dung. Planted out the five 
hand-glasses with the great white Dutch cucumbers, 
four plants in a hill. The plants are pretty much 
drawn. This evening the vehement east wind seems 



io8 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

to be abated ; and the air is soft and cloudy. Ground 
bound like a stone. 

"4, — Sowed — first, four rows of small dwarf white 
kidney beans in the lower field garden. Earthed the 
Cantaleupes [melons sent him by Philip Miller, author 
of ** The Gardener's Dictionar}' "] the third time : found 
all the plants in a very flourishing way, and the fibres 
extended to the very outsides of the hills. Cut away 
the plants to one in some of the hills; and left two in 
some, stopping down the worst plant very short 
towards the bottom of the runners, for experiment's 
sake, to see what the small wood about the stems will 
do. Some of the plants offer for male bloom. Saw 
first Redstart and Cherrysucker (Spotted Fly Catcher). 
Sowed about two dozen of the large white Dutch 
cucumber seeds for the latter hand-glasses ; the first 
sowing got full tall and big. Delicate soft rain all 
afternoon and night, which soaked the ground well to 
the root of all vegetables." 

In 1753 he bought a new edition of Miller, and the 
" Methodus Plantarum Nova " of John Ray, and he 
subscribed towards the making of a zigzag path up 
Selborne Hanger, and placed the rude stone or obelisk 
at the upper end. In that year, too, he became curate 01 
Durley, near Bishop's Waltham and Cobbett's Botley, 
riding for the Sunday service from Selborne ; and for 
a time he was also curate at West Deane, near Salisbury, 
accepting it, writes Mulso, " because it was your senti- 
ment that a clergyman should not be idle and unem- 
ployed." He often rode from Deane to Selborne — a 
fine ride to one with an eye for the downs. At one 
time he combined the duty at Deane with that of 
Newton Valence. In 1757 he accepted the living ot 



GILBERT WHITE 109 

Moreton Binkey, Hampshire, where he never lived, and, 
after putting a curate in, derived ;^30 a year from it ; 
and he exchanged Durley for Faringdon at about the 
same time. He was still in Oxford now and then, and 
was in 1757 unsuccessful candidate for the provostship 
at Oriel. 

On the death of his father at this time he was thought 
a rich man, but his private income did not exceed 
the sum due from his Fellowship, which he therefore 
retained : he kept a maid and a man, and now and then 
employed another hand for gardening. For six months 
in 1759-60 he was away at Lyndon in Rutland with his 
naturalist brother-in-law. Barker. That was his last 
long absence from Selborne, where he was now 
apparently well content to be settled for ever, the 
only one of his family living there after 1761 ; and we 
have a right to assume that he was in a condition to 
smile cheerfully at Mulso's letter on Hester's marriage 
in 1761. 

" You will give your good wishes that, as they have 
long wished for this happy state (I don't know whether 
I speak to be understood by you who continue an old 
bachelor), they may continue happy in it." 

He seems to have thought of marriage, but without 
any temptation ; his faithful and admirable biographer, 
Mr. Rashleigh Holt-White, says that the obstacle was 
the fact that he could not have supported a family 
without seeking preferment elsewhere and giving up 
"The Wakes." In this present year, 1915, at least, it 
is hard to find a flaw in the life he led, which we may 
be excused for looking back upon dotingly as upon 
some past inaccessible and imperturbable tract of our 



no A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

own life. What satisfaction we must suppose to have 
been his, in buying now and then small plots of land 
with which to round off his estate ; building a ha-ha, an 
arbour, a fruit wall, buying a sundial, post and slab and 
dial, to record the hours of serenity; planting trees 
against the walls ! The names of some of his wall trees 
survive, as, for example, Sweet-water vine, Mr. Snooke's 
black-cluster vine, Nobless peach, white Muscadine 
vine ; and of his pears, as, for example, Chaumontelle, 
Virgoleuse, Brown Bury, St. Germain, Swan's Egg. 
Year by year he went to Ringmer to stay with his 
aunt, Mrs. Snooke, always noticing her tortoise. In 
1763 "The Wakes" became his own house. It was 
often full and seldom empty of guests whom he loved, 
and there is at least one record of a party there which 
cannot soon be forgotten. A Miss Catherine Battie, a 
beautiful girl of twenty, who was staying at Selborne 
in 1763, left a diary of some of her pleasures at "The 
Wakes " and in the neighbouring fields. Thus she 
writes of a dance at White's house : 

"The morn was spent at the Harpsichord, a Ball at 
night, began minuets at half an hour after 7, then 
danced country dances till near 11, went to supper, 
after supper sat some time, sung, laught, talked, and 
then went to dancing again, danced till 3 in the morn- 
ing, at half an hour after 4 the company all went away ; 
we danced 30. Never had I such a dance in my life, 
nor ever shall I have such a one again I believe. . . . 
[Next day] got up at 10 in very good spirits (who can 
be otherwise in this dear place ?) " 

Mr. White, she records, read an acrostic " made upon 
Nanny" — i.e., Miss Anna Battie. Again : 



GILBERT WHITE in 

" In the evening walked to Noar Hill. Oh sweet even- 
ing, sure there never was anything equal to the roman- 
tickness of that dear dear hill ; never never shall I forget 
Empshott and the gloomy woods, the distant hills, the 
South Down, the woody hills on the right hand, the 
forest, the valleys, oh all are heavenly, almost too much 
for me to bear, the sight of this beauteous prospect 
gives one a pleasing melancholy." 

White suggested that the young women should dress 
as shepherdesses for a dance, and wrote : 

" Gilbert, a meddling, luckless swain, 

Must alter ladies' dresses 
To dapper hats and tuck'd up train 

And flower-enwoven tresses. 
But now the Lout, with loss of heart, 

Must for his rashness pay ; 
He rues for tamp'ring with a dart 

Too prompt before to slay !" 

Reading this diary of a hundred and fifty years ago, 
and looking at Catherine's portrait, it is hard to believe 
that she is dead. 

In 1769 White bought Hudson's "Flora Anglica," 
and, says his biographer, began the serious study of 
botany. 

In 1767 his " Garden Kalendar " developed into the 
elaborate " Naturalists' Journal,'' and he began his 
correspondence with Thomas Pennant, to whom he 
was perhaps introduced by his brother, Benjamin White, 
Pennant's publisher. Two years later he met with 
Daines Barrington, and began the letters which, with 
those to Pennant, formed his "Natural History." He 
was writing also to his brother, John White, a natu- 
ralist, at Gibraltar, giving him this excellent advice : 



112 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

" Learn as much as possible the manners of animals ; 
they are worth reams of descriptions. Frequent your 
markets and see what birds are exposed for sale." 
Birds, animals, and drawings, came frequently from 
Gibraltar to Selborne. 

As early as 1770 his sight was decaying, but on 
November 13, 1771, he could yet count sixteen fork- 
tailed kites together on the downs. Mulso, still writing 
to him, calls him " the richest man that I know, for you 
are the only man of my acquaintance that does not 
want money." 

Now he is reading "Tristram Shandy" and now 
Johnson's " Hebrides," and again Boswell. Dryden 
is for him " the greatest master of numbers of any of 
our English bards." He reads Thomson, who "falls 
into fustian sometimes . . . though he thinks like a 
poet, is often faulty in his diction." His nephew, the 
young John White, stays with him, and they read 
Horace together, finding the Epistles " a fine body of 
ethics and very entertaining and sensible." They 
never fell out about anything except the quantity of a 
Latin syllable. Apparently Jack learned from him how 
to write, for his letters are absurdly like his uncle's 
in style. He understood the schoolmaster, if he could 
not have been one himself. " Unless," he writes, "a 
schoolmaster is somewhat of a pedant, and a little 
sufficient in his way, he must expect to be soon faded 
with his drudgery." With the two friendly families at 
the vicarages of Selborne and Newton Valence life 
went very well. As to the world, he says in 1775 that 
America " is at present the subject of conversation," 
and finds a quotation from Seneca " prophetic of the 



GILBERT WHITE 113 

discovery of that vast continent," and he sees soldiers 
on their wa}^ to the war through the Hampshire lanes; 
but as the journal says in 1776: "Brother Harry's 
strong beer which was brewed last Easter Monday 
with the hordeum nudum is now tapped and incom- 
parably good." And he knew his happiness. " When 
the children are buzzing at the spinet," he writes, 
"and we grave folks sit round the chimney, I am 
put in mind of the following couplet which you will 
remember : 

" ' All the distant din that world can keep 
Rolls o'er my grotto and improves my sleep.' " 

He notes the coming of the ring-ousels in Septem- 
ber, and he praises the snuff-pincers for extinguishing 
his candles " in a very neat manner." He builds a new 
Hermitage on the hill. He adds a new parlour to his 
house and buys " long annuities." He rejoices, in 
1777, that he can at last purchase " the field behind his 
house, that angulus iste which the family have so long 
desired." He weighs the tortoise at Ringmer, and 
notices the increase of an ounce in its weight. Even 
in London he keeps up his journal, noticing, in 1785, 
two martins and a swift in Fleet Street, and hearing 
owls and a green woodpecker at Vauxhall. In 1780 
his aunt, Mrs. Snooke, died, and he received from her 
a farm and the old tortoise, Timothy. That year he 
reached " with only one infirmit}^" deafness. His 
income was about i^ioo from inherited property, and 
sometimes as much as ^^150 from his Fellowship. He 
puts Timothy into a tub of water, and finds him ** quite 
out of his element and much dismayed " ; he addresses 
8 



114 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

him through a speaking-tube without effect. He makes 
a gentle sloping path up the Hanger called the Bostal, 
instead of the steep zigzag ; but there is " a junto of 
Zigzaggians " among the neighbours. Though deaf, 
he can still enjoy hearing his nieces play jigs and 
minuets that run importunately in his head of a morn- 
ing. He still goes to Oxford for an election now and 
then. He sends out verses about crocuses and about 
wasps in treacle. He plants mullein and foxgloves 
from the Hanger in his garden, and sows beech-mast 
in the hedges and bare parts of the down. He writes 
how his hepaticas do and his Persian iris, and what he 
adds to his borders, and when the first blackcap came, 
and how late the swifts have young. He is careful 
about the state of the roads — roads w^hich in Cobbett's 
day were the worst in the world — and it is a legend 
that when children saw him coming they began to put 
stones in the ruts and got pennies for their diligence. 
As late as 1786 he is "in a sad fright, having no silk 
breeches and stockings to make a wedding visit in." 
In 1788 he is proud that his nephews and nieces 
number fift^-one. 

At last, in 1789, his book was published. As early 
as 1776 Mulso had written with remarkable fore- 
sight : 

** Your work upon the whole will immortalize your 
place of abode as well as 3'^ourself . . . No man com- 
municates the pleasure of his excursions, or makes the 
world partake of them, in a more useful manner than 
you do." 

He had, in fact, made a book which had three extra- 
ordinary merits. It contained valuable and new obser- 



GILBERT WHITE 115 

vations ; it overflowed with evidence of a new spirit — 
a spirit of minute and even loving inquiry into the life 
and personality of animals in their native surroundings 
— that was coming into natural history ; and, thirdly, it 
had style or whatever we like to call the breath of life 
in written words, and it was delightfully and easily full 
of the man himself and of the delicate eighteenth-cen- 
tury southern countryside which he knew. But the 
observations are no longer new ; the new spirit has 
been renovated by the gunless naturalists from Thoreau 
to Mr. W. H. Hudson of our own day. The man him- 
self is still fresh to succeeding generations, and thou- 
sands, who care not at all how many willow-wrens there 
be, delight to read these letters from a man so happy 
and remote from our time that he thought the dying 
fall of the true willow-wren "a joyous easy laughing 
note." We are always pleasantly conscious of the man 
in his style, which strikes us as the lines and motions of 
a person's face strike us for good or for bad, and, even 
so, in a manner that defies analysis. His quack who 
ate a toad, his boys twisting the nests out of rabbit- 
holes with a forked stick, his love of the ** shapely- 
figured aspect of the chalk hills" above that of the 
" abrupt and shapeless " mountains, his swallows feed- 
ing their young and treading on the wing, his friendly 
horse and fowl, his prodigious many-littered half-bred 
bantam sow that proved, " when fat, good bacon, juicy 
and tender," his honey-loving idiot, his crickets (" a 
good Christmas fire is to them like the heats of the dog- 
days ") — these things have in his pages a value which 
can only be attributed to his literary genius, by which 
his book survives. 



ii6 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

In 1790 he records how the trees which he planted 
have grown : the oak of 173 1 is 4 feet 5 inches in cir- 
cumference ; the ash of the same year is 4 feet 6i inches ; 
the spruce of 175 1 is 5 feet, the beech 4 feet; the elm 
of 1750 is 5 feet 3 inches ; the lime of 1756 is 5 feet 
5 inches. In 1793 he "made rhubard tarts and a rhu- 
bard pudding which was very good " ; but a bad nervous 
cough and a wandering gout made him languid and in- 
dolent ; he suffered much pain ; and on June 26, after 
his bed had been moved into the old family parlour at 
the back of his house, so that the Hanger was in sight, 
he died. 



T 



WILLIAM COBBETT 

HERE is no doubt about Cobbett's country. His 
grandfather, George Cobbett, a labourer all his 
days in that neighbourhood, lies in the churchyard at 
Farnham in Surrey, near the Hampshire border. His 
father, also George Cobbett, was farmer and innkeeper, 
and at the inn, The Jolly Farmer, beside the Wey in 
Farnham, William Cobbett was born in 1763, and lived 
for twenty years. To-day his name is as conspicuous 
outside the inn as if he were a brewer. 

Soon after he could walk he began to work for his 
father in the fields. He scared birds, weeded the wheat, 
led a single horse harrowing barley, hoed peas, and 
finally reaped and drove the plough, so that when he 
was twelve, and his eldest brother fifteen, his father said 
that the three boys " did as much work as any three 
men in the parish of Farnham." Those, he said after- 
wards, were happy days. Other kinds of happy days 
he had also. For example, he and his brothers used to 
roll down the sand-hills at the Bourn, to the south of 
Farnham, and this he considered a better education 
than he could have got at Winchester or Westminster. 
He used to steal magpies' eggs on Crooksbury Hill. 
At Waverley Abbey, too, he used to eat fruit as he 
pleased out of the kitchen-garden where he was sup- 
posed to work. The hounds after a hare near Waverley, 
when he was eight, made one of his immortal memories. 

117 



ii8 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

But bird-scaring was the thing, and when he saw the 
pale-faced children in school in Ireland, with not so 
much red in all their faces as a little round-faced bird- 
scarer he knew, he exclaimed that " that little chap, 
with his satchel full of bread and cheese or bacon, he 
was at the proper schooV He began to travel early. 
While he was weeding at Farnham Castle, he got such 
an idea of Kew Gardens from the gardener, his master, 
that next day he walked to Kew, and for a time worked 
there. Also, when he was thirteen, he accompanied his 
father to the hop-fair at Weyhill, which lies a couple of 
days distant westward, along one of the old roads of 
England, the Harrow way. At nineteen he first saw 
the sea, from the top of Portsdown, and the sight of the 
fleet riding at anchor at Spithead, though it did not 
make him a sailor, spoilt him, so he said, for a farmer. 
Next year he enlisted, and did not see England again 
till 1800. 

He remained a lover of Surrey and Hampshire, and 
of what he saw there as a child. His own education 
there was the best education. He professed to believe 
that the ^^ facilities of moving human bodies from place to 
place,'' which had improved so much since he walked 
to Kew, were " among the curses of the country, the 
destroyers of industry, of morals, and, of course, of 
happiness." The labourers' cottage gardens delighted 
him; he called them an honour to England, "which 
distinguishes it from all the rest of the world." He 
admired those who could neither read nor write, but 
could bake and brew. And he laid it down that, "when 
people are uncorrupted, they always like home best, 
be it in itself what it may." 



WILLIAM COBBETT 119 

His next country home was Botley, between Bishop's 
Waltham and Southampton, and at that time, in 1805, 
"through Farnham, Alton, and Bishop's Waltham, a 
short day's journey, being barely sixty-eight miles," 
from London. There he had four farms ; the principal 
one being Fairthorn, and, since the soil was good and 
the neighbourhood lacked workhouse, barber, attorney, 
justices of the peace, and volunteers, he thought it the 
most delightful in the world. He began at once to plant 
trees, and to work, so far as a journalist could, at those 
country labours which he considered innocent, "instruc- 
tive in their very nature," and healthful, while reading 
about them took the place in his home of "the card- 
table, the dice-box, the chess-board, and the lounging 
bottle." In the River Hamble he caught fish. For the 
benefit of the nation he promoted singlestick matches. 
His children " learned to ride, and hunt, and shoot, and 
fish, and look after cattle and sheep, and to work in the 
garden, and to feed his dogs, and to go from village to 
village in the dark." The one who was first downstairs 
in the morning " was called the Lark for the day, and 
had, amongst other indulgences, the pretty privilege of 
making his mother's nosegay and that of any lady 
visitors." Once at Alton, with twenty-three miles to 
go, he insisted on getting home, though it was eleven 
o'clock and he had dined. In spite of his companion, 
he knew that Mrs. Cobbett would be up expecting him, 
and she was, " and had a nice fire for us to sit down 
at." They lived well. " Everything was in accordance 
with the largest idea of a great English yeoman of the 
old time. Everything was excellent, everything abun- 
dant — all served with the greatest nicety by trim 



I20 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

waiting-damsels." The estate increased, and one of 
his excuses for a new purchase was that to buy stand- 
ing trees at a shilling or half a crown apiece, which will 
be worth three pounds in twenty years, " is the best 
way of insuring a fortune for children." But his 
imprisonment in 1 8 lo for the article on the Local Militia 
and German Legion ruined the farm. The children 
sent letters and bluebells to the King's Bench, and kept 
a "journal of labours" at Botley; one or two of them 
were always with him in the prison, and by means of 
their letters and drawings their education was advanced. 
But the farm suffered. He was imprisoned for debt in 
1816. In 1820 he was bankrupt, and Botley was sold. 
His next holding was but four acres at Kensington for 
a seed-farm — "quite enough," wrote his daughter, "for 
papa's amusement, though not sufficient to drag him 
into any great expenses." 

Kensington was the starting-point of his Rural Rides 
during the next ten years. The narratives were written 
down wherever he might be at the day's end. For he 
had, in spite of himself, become a traveller. His 
" Cottage Economy " was written at Worth Lodge in 
Sussex; "Cobbett's Poor Man's Friend," at Uphusband, 
in his friend Blount's house, and at the inn at Everley, 
between Ludgershall and Upavon. 

Politics gave him the excuse for his rides. He never 
could travel without an object. " I never," said he, 
'^went a-walking in the whole course of my life, never 
went to walk without having some object in view other 
than the walk." That he loved travel is clear. At 
Everley, for example, on his way from Burghclere to 
Petersfield, he remarks : " There is no pleasure in 



WILLIAM COBBETT 121 

travelling, except on horseback or on foot. Carriages 
take your body from place to place, and if you merely 
want to be conveyed they are very good ; but they enable 
you to see and to know nothing at all of the country," 
On the other hand, he liked to feel that the rides 
brought him substantial advantages. It was not enough 
to see a great deal of the country, to have a great deal 
of sport, and to lay in " a stock of health for the winter, 
sufficient to enable us to withstand the suffocation of 
this smoking and stinking Wen." So he must teach 
his son Richard arithmetic as they journeyed 

Luckily, Cobbett had learnt to regard sport as a 
serious thing. When he praised Long Island, he 
began : " Think of it — a hundred brace of woodcocks 
a day ! Think of that ! And never to see the hang-dog 
face of a tax-gatherer. Think of that ! . . ." And not 
only shooting the edible. He liked coursing. It was 
an element in that "real down-country" at Everley, 
'* from two to three miles for the hare to run to cover, 
and not a stone nor a bush nor a hillock." Remember 
also the day's hare-hunting which he writes of at Old 
Hall, in Herefordshire, or, if you do not remember, 
read it here. It was on the first of his rides, in 
November, 1821 : 

" A w^hole day most delightfully passed a-hare-hunt- 
ing, with a pretty pack of hounds kept here by Messrs. 
Palmer. They put me upon a horse that seemed to 
have been made on purpose for me, strong, tall, gentle, 
and bold, and that carried me either over or through 
everything. I, who am just the weight of a four-bushel 
sack of good wheat, actually sat on his back from day- 
light in the morning to dusk (about nine hours), with- 



122 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

out once setting my foot on the ground. Our ground 
was at Orcop, a place about four miles' distance from 
this place. We found a hare in a few minutes after 
throwing off; and in the course of the day we had to 
find four, and were never more than ten minutes in the 
finding. A steep and naked ridge, lying between two 
flat valleys, having a mixture of pretty large fields and 
small woods, formed our ground. The hares crossed 
the ridge forward and backward, and gave us numerous 
views and very fine sport. I never rode on such steep 
ground before ; and, really, in going up and down some 
of the craggy places, where the rains had washed the 
earth from the rocks, I did think once or twice of my 
neck, and how Sidmouth would like to see me. As to 
the cruelty, as some pretend, of this sport, that point I 
have, I think, settled, in one of the chapters of my 
* Year's Residence in America.' As to the expense, a 
pack, even a full pack of harriers like this, costs less than 
two bottles of wine a day, with their inseparable con- 
comitants. And as to the time thus spent, hunting is 
inseparable from early rising ; and, with habits of early 
rising, whoever wanted time for any business ?" 

Sport probably did much to preserve and cherish 
the happier, freer side of his hard practical nature. 
Without sport he would have said that the veal and 
lamb was " so exceedingly beautiful " he could hardly 
believe his eyes, but would have been less likely to 
say, when he saw those borders by the ploughed fields 
in Hertfordshire left to bear grass : ** This is most 
beautiful ! The hedges are now full of the shepherd's- 
rose, honeysuckles, and all sorts of wild-flowers ; so 
that you are upon a grass walk, with this most 
beautiful of all flower-gardens and shrubberies on 
your one hand, and with the corn on the other." That 



WILLIAM COBBETT 123 

was on the way to Chesham. He had started at four 
on June 24, and how sweet those flowers are, woven 
into a style that has flowers of no other kind ! His 
landscapes make most others look sentimental or 
fanciful, or taken from pictures or books. Not for 
nothing had he that ancestry. You seem to feel the 
two old Georges, father and grandfather, as he looks 
from Birdlip Hill to "the Morvan Hills in Wales," and 
over that dish with Gloucester in the centre — " All here 
is fine : fine farms, fine pastures ; all enclosed fields, all 
divided by hedges ; orchards a plenty." And how 
you taste the November morning when he begins : 
" Started at daybreak in a hazy frost for Reading. The 
horses' manes and ears covered with the hoar before 
we got across Windsor Park." 

The downs, above all, were Cobbett's country, the 
downs of Hampshire and Wiltshire. This is the classic 
passage written on November 11, 1822, at Uphusband 
or Hurstbourn Tarrant : 

" Uphusband once more, and, for the sixth time this 
year, over the North Hampshire hills, which, notwith- 
standing their everlasting flints, I like very much. As 
you ride along, even in a green lane, the horses' feet 
make a noise like hammering. It seems as if you were 
riding on a mass of iron. Yet the soil is good, and 
bears some of the best wheat in England. All these 
high, and, indeed, all chalky lands, are excellent for 
sheep. But on the top of some of these hills there are 
as fine meadows as I ever saw. Pasture richer, per- 
haps, than that about Swindon, in the North of Wilt- 
shire. . . ." 

Better still he liked coming down from the chalk 
hills to one of the little rivers — the Itchen, the Bourn, 



124 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

the Test, the Avon. His enthusiasm was great when 
he first caught sight of the upper valley of the Wiltshire 
Avon. He sat on his horse to look over Milton and 
Easton and Pewsey for half an hour, though he had 
not breakfasted. That was in late August. But the 
*' brightest and most beautiful " spot of all was between 
Heytesbury and Warminster in Wiltshire : 

" For there is, as appertaining to rural objects, every- 
thing that / delight in. Smooth and verdant downs in 
hills and valleys of endless variety as to height, depth, 
and shape ; rich cornland, unencumbered by fences ; 
meadows in due proportion, and those watered at 
pleasure ; and, lastly, the homesteads and villages, 
sheltered in winter, and shaded in summer by lofty and 
beautiful trees ; to which may be added roads never 
dirty and a stream never dry." 

Nor is his sense of beauty always based, either con- 
sciously or unconsciously, on what he feels or knows, 
and his ancestors before him, to be useful and habit- 
able. As he looked over the rich land near Sitting- 
bourne which lacked trees he admired it, and declared 
at the same time : " That I, a million times to one, pre- 
fer,, as a spot to live on, the heaths, the miry coppices, the 
wild woods and the forests, of Sussex and Hampshire." 
Between Farnham, Weyhill, and Botley, was the best of 
his England. You see it when he comes upon those con- 
temptible bean-fed pigs going to Highworth Market in 
Wiltshire. Whey and beans, says he, make "excellent 
pork for the Londoners, but w^'':h must meet with a 
pretty hungry stomach to swallow it in Hampshire," 
and he proceeds to speak of a hog belonging to 
Mr. Blount at Uphusband, "which now weighs about 



WILLIAM COBBETT 125 

thirty score, and will possibly weigh forty, for she 
moves about very easily yet." 

When at last Cobbett moved out again on to a farm 
in the country, it was to Ash in Surrey. He held 
Normandy Farm there from 1831 to his death in 1835. 
Thus he had but a few miles to be carried to lie in 
Farnham Churchyard, beside his father and grand- 
father, opposite the church door. 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

THE history of William Hazlitt, who wrote " On 
Going a Journey," resembles at certain points 
that of Borrow. Borrow' s father was a Cornishman 
who married a Norfolk lady. Hazlitt's father came 
from near Tipperary, and married Grace Loftus, 
daughter of an ironmonger at Wisbech, Cambridge- 
shire. Borrows father was a soldier, continually 
moving from camp to camp across England, Scotland, 
and Ireland. Hazlitt's father was a Unitarian minis- 
ter, who moved much over the face of the globe and 
over both hemispheres. William Hazlitt, the essayist, 
was born at Maidstone in 1778. In 1780 the family 
were in Ireland again, at Bandon. In 1783 they emi- 
grated to America, and spent four years at Philadelphia, 
and at Weymouth and Upper Dorchester, both in the 
neighbourhood of Boston. Returning to England in 
1787, they stopped for several months in London before 
going to Wem in Shropshire. There Hazlitt dwelt 
fourteen years, with an interlude of a year at Hackney 
Theological College in 1793, when his elder brother 
John had a studio at Long-acre. At Wem he read, and 
in the surrounding country he both walked and read. 
Some of his journeys are famous. There were four in 
1798 alone. In January he walked over to hear Coleridge 
preaching at Shrewsbury to a Unitarian congregation ; 

126 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 12; 

a few days later he walked back along the same road with 
Coleridge, who had come over to Wem to see the elder 
Hazlitt. " If I had the quaint muse of Sir Philip 
Sidney to assist me, I would write a ' Sonnet to the 
Road between Wem and Shrewsbury,' and immortalize 
every step of it by some fond enigmatical conceit." 
Then Coleridge invited him to Nether Stowey. " / 
was to visit Coleridge in the spring. This circum- 
stance was never absent from my thoughts, and 
mingled with all my feelings." He prepared himself 
by a walk to the Vale of Llangollen and back again, 
thus initiating himself "in the mysteries of natural 
scenery," and he was enchanted ; " that valley was to 
me (in a manner) the cradle of a new existence : in 
the river that winds through it, my spirit was baptized 
in the waters of Helicon." Finally he walked down 
through Worcester, Gloucester, Upton (" where I 
thought of Tom Jones and the adventure of the muff"), 
and Tewkesbury (where he arrived wet, and ** sat up 
all night to read * Paul and Virginia.' Sweet were the 
showers in early youth that drenched my body, and 
sweet the drops of pity that fell upon the books I read"), 
and Bridgwater (where he stopped two days and, grow- 
ing tired of the river, read " Camilla "). Coleridge and 
he made an excursion. through Minehead to Linton, 
and on Hazlitt's homeward journey shared the road 
from Bridgwater to Bristol. At another time Hazlitt 
walked across England to Wisbech to see his mother's 
birthplace. He walked also to see picture-galleries. 
Probably he had a real need to walk as a relief from 
seclusion among books at Wem, and the reading of 
Rousseau's ** Confessions " (he gave two years to the 



128 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

" Confessions " and " La Nouvelle Heloise," and called 
them the happiest years of his life), and walking as 
Rousseau walked, might well have turned the need into 
a semi-heroic delight, he being then eighteen. 

Hazlitt's youth at Wem was terminated by a stay 
of four months in Paris in 1802, where he copied 
Titian's pictures at the Louvre. Then in 1803- 1805 he 
went about England painting portraits — Coleridge's, 
Wordsworth's, Hartley Coleridge's, among others. 

Before this Hazlitt had really become in a sense a 
Londoner. Through his brother John and Coleridge 
he met the men who wrote, from Charles Lamb down 
to William Godwin. Books and bookish company, and 
writing, especially for a living, can turn any man into a 
Londoner, and Hazlitt visited London very often for a 
poor man living in Shropshire. 

In 1808 he gained a new country connexion, by 
marrying Sarah Stoddart, who owned some cottages 
in Hampshire. There, at Winterslow, the Hazlitts 
had their abode until 1812. There two children were 
born, the second alone surviving. There they were 
visited by Charles and Mary Lamb. In 1812 Hazlitt 
and his wife and son went to live at 19, York Street, 
Westminster, which Milton had inhabited from 1652 to 
1658. Hazlitt worked as dramatic critic. Parliamentary 
reporter, lecturer, and contributor to newspapers and 
magazines. He is said never to have read a book 
through after he was thirty. To make up for the lack 
of opportunity and excuse for walking, he played rac- 
quets. But he had intervals in his work. Thus, in 
1823 he ran up to Edinburgh to be divorced, life with 
Mrs. Hazlitt having been uncomfortable for some 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 129 

time, even before the love affair with Sarah Walker 
which he embalmed in " Liber Amoris." Also, in the 
following year, he married a second wife and took the 
journey through France and Italy, of which he made 
a book. The lady preferred to remain behind in 
Switzerland. They never met again. 

Hazlitt, however, was attached to Winterslow by 
other ties than marriage. His son has told us that he 
was attracted by the woods of Tytherleigh and the 
friendship of Mr, Baring Wall, owner of Norman 
Court — by Clarendon Wood — by Stonehenge — and by 
'* the thorough quiet of the place, the sole interruption 
of which was the passage, to and fro, of the London 
mails." His lodging was at Winterslow Hut, an old 
inn, now called The Pheasant, standing seven miles 
out of Salisbury, on the road to Andover, or about 
a mile before the road to Stockbridge and Winchester 
branches out. " It was there," says the son, " that 
most of his thinking was done " He wrote there, I 
believe, the " Life of Napoleon." One of the best col- 
lections of his essays, posthumously made, was named 
after the place, so that " Winterslow " has come to 
seem a romantic invention, and by association appro- 
priate to Hazlitt. 

" I have never had a watch," says he in the essay 
On a Sundial, " nor any other mode of keeping time, 
in my possession, nor ever wish to learn how time 
goes. It is a sign I have had little to do, few avoca- 
tions, few engagements. When I am in town, I can 
hear the clock ; and when I am in the country, I can 
listen to the silence. What I like best is to lie whole 
mornings on a sunny bank on Salisbury Plain, with- 
9 



I30 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

out any object before me, neither knowing nor caring 
how time passes, and thus * with light-winged toys of 
feathered idleness ' to melt down hours to moments. 
Perhaps some such thoughts as I have here set down 
float before me like motes before my half-shut eyes, or 
some vivid image of the past by forcible contrast 
rushes by me — * Diana and her fawn, and all the 
glories of the antique world ' ; then I start away to 
prevent the iron from entering my soul, and let fall 
some tears into that stream of time which separates 
me farther and farther from all I once loved ! At 
length I rouse myself from my reverie, and home to 
dinner, proud of killing time with thought — nay, even 
without thought." 

Hazlitt makes a very great deal, when he is writing 
about the country, out of books and out of himself seen 
far off in time and space, rather like a character in fiction. 
He does not describe much or distinguish nicely be- 
tween places. Nor does he communicate a sense of 
happy travel or travel at all, but of a man looking back 
at it. He loved looking back. In the essay just quoted, 
church bells bring Rousseau's " Confessions " into his 
mind, and the curfew, " a great favourite with me," re- 
minds him of his boyhood : " I used to hear it when 
a boy. It tells a tale of other times. The days that 
are past, the generations that are gone, the tangled 
forest glades and hamlets brown of my native country, 
the woodman's art, the Norman warrior armed for 
the battle or in his festive hall, the Conqueror's iron 
rule and peasant's lamp extinguished, all start up at 
the clamorous peal, and fill my mind with fear and 
wonder. I confess, nothing at present interests me 
but what has been — the recollection of the impres- 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 131 

sions of my early life, or events long past. . . ." 
His England is compounded chiefly out of books and 
early memories. You see in his essay called "Merry 
England " what a part literature and art and history have 
played in making Hazlitt's England. And he has said 
himself, in an essay " On the Love of the Country," that 
association accounts chiefly for our pleasure — for his 
pleasure — in the country. " It is not," he says, " the 
beautiful and magnificent alone that we admire in 
Nature ; the most insignificant and the rudest objects 
are often found connected with the strongest emotions ; 
we become attached to the most common and familiar 
images, as to the face of a friend whom we have long 
known, and from whom we have received many benefits. 
It is because natural objects have been associated with 
the sports of our childhood, with air and exercise, with 
our feelings in solitude, when the mind takes the 
strongest hold of things, and clings with the fondest 
interest to whatever strikes its attention ; with change 
of place, the pursuit of new scenes, and thoughts of 
distant friends. . . ." **To be young," he says in the 
essay On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth — " to be 
young is to be as one of the immortals," and that great 
and long sentence about the pageant of " brave sub- 
lunary things" opens with : "To see the golden sun, the 
azure sky, the outstretched ocean ; to walk upon the 
green earth, and be lord of a thousand creatures ; to 
look down yawning precipices or over distant sunny 
vales . . ." 

And nevertheless it is a glorious idea of the earth 
rather than the earth itself, Wem, or Llangollen, or 
the Quantocks, or Salisbury Plain, that seems to inspire 



132 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

Hazlitt. The earth has perhaps passed into the face 
of his writing, but we cannot say how or where. And 
he certainly has no country to be associated with him 
for any other reason than that he lived in it, walked to 
and fro in it, and occasionally wrote about it w^ith gusto. 
In the essay " On Going a Journe}^," Hazlitt says : 
" I go out of town in order to forget the town and all 
that is in it" The country was a temporary delight 
and a luxury. London was the fixed necessity, and in- 
side it the epicurean cried out : *' Give me the clear blue 
sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, 
a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to 
dinner — and then to thinking !" In the country he was 
often thinking his best. "It is hard," he says, "if I 
cannot start some game on these lone heaths," or 
" there was no question in metaphysics I could not 
bandy to and fro for twenty, thirty, forty miles of the 
Great North Road, and at it again the next day as fresh 
as ever." His towns are more particularly described 
and suggested than his country. He understood what 
he was looking at in London, whereas in the country 
perhaps he saw chiefly landscape and the mysterious 
multiplication of mutton and turnips. For example, 
the garden of the Tuileries suggested to him perversely 
this passage of local patriotism : "For a real West End, 
for a substantial cut into the heart of a metropolis, com- 
mend me to the streets and squares on each side of the 
top of Oxford Street, with Grosvenor and Portman 
Squares at one end, and Cavendish and Hanover at the 
other, linked together by Bruton, South Audley, and a 
hundred other fine old streets, with a broad, airy pave- 
ment, a display of comfort, of wealth, of taste and rank, 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 133 

all about you, each house seeming to have been the resi- 
dence of some respectable old English family for half a 
century past, and with Portland Place looking out to- 
wards Hampstead and Highgate, with their hanging 
gardens and lofty terraces, and Primrose Hill nestling 
beneath them, in green, pastoral luxury, the delight 
of the Cockneys, the aversion of Sir Walter and his 
merry men." He himself lived as a bachelor in Down 
Street and in Half-Moon Street, but later, when he was 
less prosperous, in Bouverie Street, and finally at 
6, Frith Street, Soho, whence in 1830 he was borne to 
St. Anne's Church, hard by, to be buried. 



RICHARD JEFFERIES 

THE author of" The Amateur Poacher," "The Story 
of my Heart," " The Dewy Morn," and " Ama- 
ryllis at the Fair," has his domain in a very special sense. 
He was born and bred and lived the greater part of his 
life in the country where his ancestors for generations 
had been born, bred, and buried ; and when he wrote 
most of his books, he either made this country his 
subject-matter or his setting. In " The Gamekeeper at 
Home," "The Amateur Poacher," "Round about a 
Great Estate," " Toilers of the Field," " Hodge and 
his Masters," "The Dewy Morn," "The Story of my 
Heart," and in passages and essays in most of his 
other books, he described this country intimately, either 
for its own sake or because he could not uncover his 
soul without it. He knew it so well from childish 
rambles, long walks as sportsman, naturalist, and 
reporter, and loiterings as lover and philosopher, that 
it became a portion of himself, as if he had partly 
created it, as in fact he did. If we walk from Swindon 
to Marlborough, Devizes, Calne, or Wootton Bassett, 
after reading Jefferies, we do not see the same country 
as if we were ignorant of him. So well did he know 
it that he practically never mentions any part of it by 
name, and then usually by a fictitious name. He was 
creating, not referring to places well known, or which 

134 



RICHARD JEFFERIES 135 

people might visit for verification ; and to understand 
his best books it is by no means necessary to go and 
look at Coate Farm, where he was born in 1848, and 
Coate Reservoir, where he fished and boated, and 
Liddington Castle on Liddington Hill, where he used to 
go to be alone with the sun and his own soul, and all the 
downland southward to Savernake Forest and westward 
to Avebury and Devizes ** The Amateur Poacher " is 
complete in itself, and lives without aid from gossip and 
topography. There is no need to know that Jefferies 
was drawing upon his youth and boyhood at Coate. 
When towards his thirtieth year Jefferies had to leave 
Wiltshire for the neighbourhood of London, he began 
at once to use his enormous material freely, easily, and 
happily, in making " The Amateur Poacher " and the 
other early books. Then he turned his attention to 
the Surrey country round about his home at Tolworth, 
Surbiton, and afterwards to the neighbourhoods of 
Eltham, West Brighton, and Crowborough, where he 
spent parts of his invalid life. He now used place- 
names freely, for he was writing as a journalist for a 
London newspaper public, and he was writing about 
places to which he was mainly but a visitor, so that his 
work was description pure and simple, not creation. 
Some excellent essays he did of a creative kind founded 
on those later lands of sojourn, as well as written there. 
Such, for example, are " Hours of Spring " and " The 
Winds of Heaven" in "Field and Hedgerow." But 
although all his best work was written away from Wilt- 
shire, when he had left it for ever, most of it was 
somehow connected with Wiltshire. 

Jefferies is a great Wiltshire name, and the parish 



136 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

registers of Chisledon and of Holyrood, old Swindon, 
are full of them. They were farmers and labourers 
who intermarried with the other Wiltshire families 
of similar estate — the Reeveses, Harveys, Garlicks, 
Jeroms, Chowleses, Nashes, and so on. Richard's 
great-grandfather was born about 1734 at Draycot 
Foliat, where the road from Swindon to Marlborough 
pierces the downs, married Fanny Luckett of Lechlade, 
and lived for some time at Rodbourne Cheney, before 
he purchased Coate Farm and a mill and bakery 
at Swindon in 1800. Richard's grandfather, John 
Jefferies, worked for a time with a Fleet Street printer 
before he came to the bakery at Swindon ; and in 
London he married a wife, Fanny Ridger, and his eldest 
son, James Luckett Jefferies, was born. This was 
Richard's father, who spent some time in America 
before settling at Coate Farm, with a town-bred wife, 
Elizabeth Gyde. The Gydes were from Painswick, 
near Stroud in Gloucestershire. Father and mother 
appear, fictitiously handled, in " Amaryllis at the 
Fair." Jefferies of an earlier day are alluded to in 
"Saint Guido " and "The Amateur Poacher"; they 
lie buried at Chisledon, where Richard Jefferies was 
married. 

Coate Farm — forty acres of rich meadow-land and 
a little house at the beginning of the village street, 
looking south towards the line of naked downs, north 
to Swindon and the low dairy lands of North Wiltshire 
— was all of old Richard's property that came to young 
Richard's father. Born in this little house in 1848, 
Jefferies dwelt there for the most part until his mar- 
riage. Gradually he extended his curiosity and 



RICHARD JEFFERIES 137 

pleasure over more and more of the surrounding 
country. His first childish games in the garden and 
home fields are imaginatively recorded in " Wood 
Magic." Later he had the use of a gun in the fields 
and a rod on the reservoir ; his adventures are treated 
with different degrees of heightening in " The Amateur 
Poacher," " Bevis," and "After London." As sports- 
man and naturalist he wandered through Burderop 
Woods, on the downs, and to Savernake Forest. As 
journalist he travelled to the towns within a radius of 
fifteen miles from Swindon — to Hungerford, Marl- 
borough, Devizes, Calne, Wootton Bassett, Malmes- 
bury, Highworth, Wantage, and Lambourn. He 
became antiquarian, and made the acquaintance ot 
farmers, parsons, and country gentlemen. At police- 
courts, inns, and markets, and in the woods, he met 
characters of all sorts, picked up information about 
country crafts and the history and legend of the dis- 
trict. He kept notebooks and stored his memory. 
He wrote a history of the principal family, the God- 
dards. He contributed archaeological and descriptive 
articles on the towns, famous houses, and churches, 
that he knew. Though he was never a practical farmer, 
he knew the men, the occupations, and the movements, 
of the district. The Great Western Railway works at 
Swindon were the subject of a masterly informa- 
tive sketch. Besides being an observer, he was a 
dreamer and a thinker, and had his places for rapture 
and meditation in the fields and on the downs. His 
wife came to him from a neighbouring farm, one of the 
fields of which gave its title to his fiction " Green 
Feme Farm." 



138 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

The family lived at Coate with difficulties and dissen- 
sions : they were poor and they were dissatisfied. 
The house itself appears again and again, clad in thatch, 
now long since supplanted by slates, in " Wild Life in 
a Southern County," with the village of Coate, the 
reservoir, Burderop Woods, and Marlborough Forest, 
and the villages of Broad Hinton, Bishopston, Aid- 
bourne, etc.; it reappears more vividly in "The Amateur 
Poacher," so that no one who has read that book as a 
boy forgets the stuffed fox grinning up in the garret ; 
the garret itself, the old pistols, Cromwellian cannon- 
ball, and legendary skeleton ; the perch-fishing in the 
reservoir; the gun, the gun! andjefferies and the inn- 
keeper's son, Dickon, coursing on the downs : 

" Just at the foot of the hill the grass is tall and grey; 
there, too, are the dead dry stalks of many plants that 
cultivation has driven from the ploughed fields, and 
that find a refuge at the edge. A hare starts from the 
verge and makes up the downs. Dickon slips the 
hounds, and a faint halloo comes from the shepherds 
and ploughmen. It is a beautiful sight to see the 
hounds bound over the sward ; the sinewy back bends 
like a bow, but a bow that, instead of an arrow, shoots 
itself; the deep chests drink the air. Is there any 
moment as joyful in life as the second when the chase 
begins ? . . . " 

" Round about a Great Estate " is a half-idyllic 
handling of some of the same material, with much that 
came from the memories of older people, his father and 
grandfather, the farmers and keepers of the country- 
side. Hilary Luckett is a character founded probably 
on his father and his wife's father, Andrew Baden of 



RICHARD JEFFERIES 139 

Day House Farm. The others are more or less cer- 
tainly to be identified if you wish. The local lore, the 
works and days of Hilary, the beauty of Cicely, the 
dairy, the meadows, and the woods, make up one of 
the most delicious rustic books in the world. 

Here Jefferies was beginning to be freer and more 
masterly with his material, ''The Poacher" and 
" Round about a Great Estate " are very good of their 
kind. In future he was to make little use of Wiltshire 
notebooks, but great use of imaginative memories of 
Wiltshire. The reservoir reappears in the fiction of 
" Bevis " and, as a great inland sea, in " After London." 
The grand armies of the rooks and wood-pigeons in 
" Wood Magic " were bred in Burderop Woods, the 
" Okebourne Chace " of " Round about a Great 
Estate." Had he lost his sight after leaving Wiltshire, 
his best books would have been very much as they are 
now. As a naturalist, he wrote in " The Life of the 
Fields " : " There have been few things I have read of 
or studied which in some manner or other I have not 
seen illustrated in this county while out in the fields." 
And so, as an autobiographical artist, he tells us that 
his native downs and a clear spring of water some- 
where amongst them helped him to his illumination : 
" So many times I came to it [the spring], toiling up 
the long and shadowless hill in the burning sunshine, 
often carrying a vessel to take some of it home with 
me. There was a brook, indeed ; but this was different, 
it was the spring ; it was taken home as a beautiful 
flow'er might be brought. It is not the physical water; 
it is the sense of feeling that it conveys. Nor is it the 
physical sunshine ; it is the sense of inexpressible 



140 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

beauty which it brings with it. Of such I still drink, 
and hope to do so still deeper." The best things in his 
poor novels are when he depends on his knowledge of 
North Wiltshire and his personal experiences out of 
doors. The beautiful girl in " Restless Human Hearts," 
who fancied that as she lay on the sward she could 
hear the world's heart beating, foretells Amaryllis and 
the Felise of " The Dewy Morn." In "World's End," 
the hero, like Jefferies, wires ground game, and by 
selling it to the carrier is enabled to buy the works of 
poets, philosophers, historians, and scientists. 

Jefferies' residence at Tolworth, Surbiton, from 1877 
to 1882, introduced him to Hook, Chessington, Clay- 
gate, the Hogsmill river, and all the country of " Nature 
near London." He was astonished and delighted by 
the richness of the bird-Hfe. He made pilgrimages 
daity to the same place as he did at home — "to an aspen 
by a brook," probably the Hogsmill, in Surrey, as 
to Liddington Castle, in Wiltshire. In " Woodlands " 
he describes Woodstock Lane from Long Ditton to 
Claygate, and Prince's Lane and Prince's Covers ; 
Thames Ditton in " The Modern Thames "; the Hogs- 
mill at Tolworth Court Farm in "A Brook," and "A 
London Trout "; and so on. For the most part Jefferies 
was hastily providing information straight from note- 
books. But here at Tolworth he must have written 
all his early country books — "The Gamekeeper," 
"Wild Life," "The Poacher," " Round about a Great 
Estate," and " Hodge and his Masters." Here began 
the series of diseases which destroyed him. 

He never stayed long anywhere after he left Surbiton. 
The summer of 1882 was spent partly on Exmoor, 



RICHARD JEFFERIES 141 

whence came the material of ** Red Deer " and some 
of the essays in "The Life of the Fields" and "Field 
and Hedgerow." By the end of the year he was at 
" Savernake," Lorna Road, West Brighton, at the edge 
of a noble down country, which he had visited as a 
child and later. We know, for example, that he had 
made some of the first notes for "The Story of my 
Heart" at Pevensey in 1880. The addition of the sea 
to the downs did for him all that could be done for him 
without restoring him to youth and Wiltshire. The 
last essays of" Nature near London" show his delight 
at Beachy Head, in the waves coming round the 
promontory before a west wind, which " give the idea 
of a flowing stream, as they did in Homer's day " — 
nay ! his delight, in the railway-train, at the sight of 
Ditchling Beacon : " Hope dwells there somewhere, 
mayhap in the breeze, on the sward, or the pale cups 
of the harebells." In spite of ill-health, he got to know 
the whole range of the South Downs. 

" The Story of my Heart " was written chiefly at 
Brighton, and the book is full of Sussex sea as well as 
of Wiltshire downs. " The Dewy Morn " as we know 
it was probably also written at Brighton, rather after 
than before "The Story of my Heart"; so, too, were 
" Red Deer," " After London " probably, and some of 
the essays of "The Open Air" and "The Life of the 
Fields." 

Jefferies was still at Brighton in June, 1884; in Sep- 
tember of that year he wrote from 14, Victoria Road, 
Eltham. By June, 1885, he was lodging at " Rehoboth 
Villa," Jarvis Brook, Rotherfield, while he sought a 
cottage at Tunbridge Wells. He settled instead at 



142 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

*' The Downs/' Crowborough, for about a year, until 
the summer of 1886. Some of his essays — for example, 
the last four in "The Open Air" — are recognizable as 
connected with Eltham. At Crowborough he wrote 
some of the ripest descriptions and meditations in 
'* Field and Hedgerow," and perhaps "Amaryllis at the 
Fair," which was finished by May, 1886, and in one 
place seems to reflect the ill winter of 1885-86. His 
last work of all, including the introduction to "The 
Natural History of Selborne" (Scott Library), and 
perhaps "My Old Village," was done at "Sea View," 
Goring, Sussex, where he was to die in August, 1887. 
Though he never lived in London, JefFeries became 
no inconsiderable Londoner by right of a long series of 
visits, from the time when as a boy he used to go to the 
printing-house of his uncle, Thomas Harrild, in Shoe 
Lane. He could possess his thoughts in Trafalgar 
Square and under the portico of the British Museum, 
and, as he records in " The Story of my Heart," he had 
his great moments amid the throng by the Mansion 
House. " Let the grandees go to the opera," said he in 
"Amaryllis"; "for me the streets." And he asked: 
" Could Xerxes, could great Pompey, could Caesar with 
all his legions, could Lucullus with all his oysters, ever 
have enjoyed such pleasure as this, just to spend 
money freely in the streets of London ?" And again : 
" Let the meads be never so sweet, the mountain-top 
never so exalted, still to Fleet Street the mind will 
return." He was pleased with the red roofs of Ber- 
mondsey as he saw them on approaching London 
Bridge by train from Eltham. He loved the ships 
on the Thames, and, gazing at the great red bow- 



RICHARD JEFFERIES 143 

sprit of an Australian clipper, ridiculed the idea that 
Italian painters, had they seen such vessels, "would 
have been contented with crank caravels and tales twice 
told already." The colour of the Horse Guards, the 
dresses of the women, the pictures in the National 
Gallery, the statues in the Museum, the lions in 
Trafalgar Square, were among his delights. 

But Jefferies' country is the country, part of North 
Wiltshire round about his native Coate, which he 
created in his early books, his pure country books, and 
used afterwards for the texture of autobiography, 
fiction, and meditation. To go over this country now 
with physical footsteps is an act of pure piety. But to 
explore the regions of Surrey where he roamed in his 
last healthy years, and of Sussex, where his five years 
of dying were chiefly spent, is legitimate curiosity. 
He himself was but a visitor there. He was within 
the London area, writing for a London public, helping 
them, offering them a very strong inducement, to see 
for themselves. Here new things are to be discovered. 
But in his home-country we are in a spirit-land ; not 
even Mr. Alfred Williams's delightful gleanings from 
the same fields in the Vale of White Horse convince 
us to the contrary. 



THOMAS HARDY 

MR. HARDY himself has said, in smaller type 
than his topographers, nearly all that need be 
said about his country of Wessex. The series of local 
novels beginning with "Far from the Madding Crowd" 
" seemed," he says, " to require a territorial definition 
of some sort to lend unity to their scene," and the name 
Wessex first appeared in that novel. At the moment 
he must have imagined that he was now, with a com- 
plete set of fictitious names, a free man and could hurt 
no one. Possibly he did not think to rouse curiosity. 
But as early as 1876 the Examiner entitled an article on 
the modern peasant " The Wessex Labourer," and 
gradually " the appellation which I had thought to re- 
serve to the horizons and landscapes of a merely realis- 
tic dream-country has become more and more popular 
as a practical provincial definition ; and the dream- 
country has, by degrees, solidified into a utilitarian 
region which people can go to, take a house in, and 
write to the papers from." Mr. Hardy begs — or begged 
in 1895 — all "good and gentle readers" to forget this, 
and " to refuse steadfastly to believe that there are any 
inhabitants of a Victorian Wessex outside the pages of 
this and the companion volumes in which they were 
first discovered." And yet in this same preface he calls 
attention to the fact that Weatherbury, or Puddletown, 

144 



THOMAS HARDY 145 

and its personages, really were at one time very much 
like what they are in the book, though now so different. 

The discovery of Mr. Hardy and of the real places 
behind the fictitious names has created a difficult prob- 
lem. Apparently he has not tampered with geography, 
has not done anything but change a large proportion 
of the names. It was, then, only a matter of time to 
identify, for example, the three places here mentioned — 
" on the turnpike road, between Casterbridge and 
Weatherbury, and about three miles from the former 
place, is Yaibury Hill" — as Dorchester, Puddletown, 
and Yellowham Hill. 

Mr. Hardy was born in 1840 near Yellowham Hill, 
at Higher Bockampton. At seventeen he was articled 
to an architect at Dorchester. The twenties he seems 
to have spent largely in London. Then, after his mar- 
riage in 1874, he lived some time at Sturminster New- 
ton (or Stourcastle), in Blackmoor Vale. He went to 
"Max Gate," Dorchester, in 1885. 

Without knowing that Mr. Hardy has written for the 
Dorset Archaeological Society on the contents of some 
barrows opened on the downs, it is easy to guess some- 
thing of his tastes and studies. It is even possible to 
believe that he could have made as fine a set of books 
had he altogether excluded fiction, had he never 
troubled to satisfy with a " slightly-built " romance his 
wish " to set the emotional history of two infinitesimal 
lives against the stupendous background of the stellar 
universe, and to impart to readers the sentiment that, 
of these contrasting magnitudes, the smaller might be 
the greater to them as men." For it must be remem- 
bered that he has called his novels his " Little Exhibition 



146 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

of Wessex Life." If either of the partners, Wessex 
Life and Romance, has suffered, it is not Romance. 
Both in the prefaces and in the stories themselves, Mr. 
Hardy tells the public more than a story-teller need 
about his attitude towards things which it is his task 
to bring for the first time before the mind. Thus, he 
tells us in the preface to " The Woodlanders" what he 
thinks of the scenery about Little Hintock, or Middle- 
marsh : that it " cannot be regarded as inferior to any 
inland scenery of the sort in the West of England, or 
perhaps anywhere in the kingdom." He comments on 
the fact that world-wide repute and absolute fameless- 
ness attach to spots of equal beauty and accessibihty. 
" The neighbourhood of High Stoy (I give, as else- 
where, the real names to natural features), Bubb Down 
Hill, and westward to Montacute ; of Bulbarrow, Ham- 
bledon Hill, and eastward to Shaston, Windy Green, 
and Stourhead, teems with landscapes which, by a mere 
accident of iteration, might have been numbered among 
the scenic celebrities of the century." His home at 
Sturminster Newton was on the low land m the midst 
of these hills. The opening of this story presents us 
with a " rambler who, for old association's sake, should 
trace the forsaken coach-road running almost in a merid- 
ional line from Bristol to the south shore of England." 
The spot, he says, is lonely, and " when the days are 
darkening the many gay charioteers now perished who 
have rolled along the way, the blistered soles that have 
trodden it, and the tears that have wetted it," reappear 
in the rambler's mind. And again, a little later, when he 
has got his first characters close to High Stoy Hill and 
in sight of Middlemarsh among the woods, he says, 



THOMAS HARDY 147 

showing us how a scene must have set his mind work- 
ing before he began to write extended fiction : 

" From this self-contained place rose in stealthy 
silence tall stems of smoke, which the eye in imagina- 
tion could trace downward to their root on quiet 
hearthstones, festooned overhead with hams and 
flitches. It was one of those sequestered spots out- 
side the gates of the world where may usually be found 
more meditation than action, and more listlessness 
than meditation ; where reasoning proceeds on narrow 
premisses, and results in inferences wildly imaginative ; 
yet where, from time to time, dramas of a grandeur and 
unity truly Sophoclean are enacted in the real, by 
virtue of the concentrated passions and closely-knit 
interdependence of the lives therein." 

So Mr. Hardy would have looked down on Middle- 
marsh, not the people in the carrier's cart. 

You see that he is, as he says, exhibiting Wessex to 
us, giving the hills and rivers their true names and 
notably suggesting their appearances, but painting 
them with a brush dipped in the "earthquake and 
eclipse " of his own mind, and still more so the towns 
and villages and the people themselves. Everywhere 
he makes a double impression by the sound rusticity 
of many characters, and by his own solitary, brooding, 
strongly-coloured mind dominating men and landscape. 

On the whole, then, the mixture ot ancient with 
invented or resuscitated or shghtly perverted names 
very well symbolizes Mr. Hardy's mixed attitude and 
treatment. Only one wishes — I wish — that he had not 
conceded so much to the inevitable curiosity. What a 
pleasure for a man to discover for himself perhaps only 



148 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

a few of the originals ! What a nuisance to have an 
edition of the novels and poems with a map of Wessex 
at the end of every single volume, showing the exact 
position of the places bearing fictitious names. 

" It may be well to state," said Mr. Hardy in 1895, ** in 
response to inquiries from readers interested in lands- 
cape, prehistoric antiquities, and especially old English 
architecture, that the description of those backgrounds 
in this and its companion novels has been done from 
the real. Many features of the first two kinds have 
been given under their existing names. , . . And in 
planning the stories the idea was that large towns and 
points tending to mark the outline of Wessex — such as 
Bath, Plymouth, the Start, Portland Bill, Southampton, 
etc. — should be named outright. The scheme was not 
greatly elaborated, but, whatever its value, the names 
remain still. 

" In respect of places described under fictitious or 
ancient names — for reasons that seemed good at the 
time of writing — discerning persons have affirmed in 
print that they clearly recognize the originals — such as 
Shaftesbury in ' Shaston,' Bere Regis in ' Kingsbere,' 
Woodbury Hill in ' Greenhill,' and so on. I shall not 
be the one to contradict them ; I accept their state- 
ments as at least an indication of their real and kindly 
interest in the scenes." 

It is a master speaking. He has probably formed 
his opinion as to whether the identifications may not 
tend to spoil the fiction — at least for the moment. 
That they stand in the way of perfect pleasure 
I have little doubt. But already twenty, thirty, forty 
years have passed over, say, Puddletown, and a man 
may say simply that here once was Weatherbury ; 



THOMAS HARDY 149 

or, again, in the Vale of Blackmoor he may recall that 
Mr. Hardy's Blackmoor was " an engirdled and secluded 
region, for the most part untrodden as yet by tourist or 
landscape-painter, though within a four hours' journey 
from London. " At Bournemouth he must reflect that 
Sandbourne was a mere upstart exotic town, incompar- 
ably less real in " Tess " than " the enormous Egdon 
Waste " beginning at the edge of it. Egdon is nowhere 
soperfect as on Mr. Hardy's page. And as to Budmouth, 
not everyone will say of it, or want to say, with 
Mr. Wilkinson Sherren, that "the phantoms of Mr. 
Hardy's creations haunt the streets." I have never 
been to Marnhull or Marlott, but if I went, and if I 
happened to think of Tess there, neither the fiction nor 
the place would be much the worse for the irrelevancy. 
Has it ever helped anyone much to think of Wey- 
mouth in ** The Trumpet Major," Stinsford in " Under 
the Greenwood Tree," Wareham in "The Return of 
the Native" or "The Hand of Ethelberta," Cerne 
Abbas and Woolbridge in "Tess," Wimborne in "Two 
on a Tower," Sherborne in " The Woodlanders " or 
"A Group of Noble Dames," Shaftesbury in "Jude 
the Obscure," Weyhill in "The Mayor of Caster- 
bridge," Woodbury Hill in " Far from the Madding 
Crowd"? 

I prefer Mr. Hardy's poems to his novels, and there 
the place-names offer many pleasures and provoke 
several kinds of curiosity. Sometimes the place is 
given, it appears, out of pure fidelity to the fact. He 
writes no poetry that could suffer by names and dates. 
That something happened 

" At this point of time, at this point in space," 



ISO A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

it pleases him to put on record, as when he signs " Max 
Gate, 1899," at the end of "An August Midnight " : 

" A shaded lamp and a waving blind, 
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor ; 
"" On this scene enter — winged, horned, and spined — 

A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore ; 
While 'mid my page there idly stands 
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands. . . . 

' Thus meet me five, in this still place, 
At this point of time, at this point in space. 
— My guests parade my new-penned ink, 
Or bang at the lamp glass, whirl, and sink. 
* God's humblest, they !' I muse. Yet why ? 
They know Earth secrets that know not I." 

Somehow the two stanzas of '* The Comet at 
Yalbury or Yell'ham " do as much as " Two on a 
Tower " to " set the emotional history of two in- 
finitesimal lives against the stupendous background 
of the stellar universe " : 

" It bends far over Yell'ham Plain, 
And we, from Yell'ham Height, 
Stand and regard its fiery train, 
So soon to swim from sight. 

" It will return long years hence, when 
As now its strange swift shine 
Will fall on Yell'ham ; but not then 
On that sweet form of thine." 

The rustic names, if anything, emphasize the little- 
ness, yet save it from abstraction. Sometimes Mr. 
Hardy gains the same effect of reality by withholding 
the name, conspicuously as in " Her Dilemma " (in 

Church), tacitly as in " At an Inn " and " The 

Rejected Member's Wife," where everything is precise 
but names are omitted. The general effect of using 



THOMAS HARDY 151 

local names with no significance for the stranger, and 
no special private value of sound or association for the 
poet, as in 

" From Pummery-Tout to where the Gibbet is . . ." 

or 

" Scene. — A sad-coloured landscape, Waddonvale," 
or 

" By Mellstock Lodge and Avenue," 
or 

" Not far from Mellstock — so tradition saith — " 
or 

" While High Stoy trees twanged to Bubb Down Hill, 
And Bubb Down to High Stoy " 

the general effect is to aid reality by suggestions of 
gross and humble simplicity. It might become a 
trick or device, but in Mr. Hardy it is not either, 
though it succeeds in different degrees. In a recurring 
line like the following, the name gives even a kind of 
magic reality, and perhaps magnifies the wind which 
has no name : 

" GrufHy growled the wind on Toller downland broad and bare." 

The least effect is to make sure of keeping the poem 
to earth by keeping it to Dorset, so that a storm strikes 
freshly on jaded ears by means of 

" The drone of Thorncombe trees. 

The Froom in flood upon the moor, i, 

The mud of Mellstock Leaze." 

Yet there are some names which can have, perhaps, 
only a private significance, as in the title "Autumn in 
King's Hintock Park" (a fictitious name to boot), and 
in the " Weymouth " at the foot of " The Dawn after 
the Dance." The fictitious names — "Great Forest" for 
" New Forest," e.g. — are awkward, too, in " A Tramp- 



152 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

Woman's Tragedy," where many of the names are real, 
and where the author is so particular as to add this 
note on " Windwhistle " (near Cricket St. Thomas, on 
the road from Crewkerne to Chard) : 

" The highness and dryness of Windwhistle Inn was 
impressed upon the writer two or three years ago, 
when, after climbing on a hot afternoon to the beauti- 
ful spot near which it stands, and entering the inn for 
tea, he was informed by the landlady that none could 
be had, unless he would fetch water from a valley half 
a mile off, the house containing not a drop, owing to its 
situation." 

But the names here undoubtedly help, and, as the 
poem describes travel on foot in South-West England, 
the more a man knows about these roads perhaps the 
more he likes it. 

Mr. Hardy's feeling for roads is a good thing to come 
across in poem or novel. In " The Mayor of Caster- 
bridge," the exiled Henchard chooses to work on the 
" old western highway," the artery of Wessex, because, 
" though at a distance of fifty miles, he was virtually 
nearer to her whose welfare was so dear than he 
would be at a roadless spot only half as remote," and 
there presently he meets a Casterbridge carter upon 
the road. That is imaginative fact. It is clear that 
Mr. Hardy has felt somehow thus about a highway : 
he applies his feeling like a poet. That Exeter road 
near which he was born reappears many times, "The 
Alarm " (in memory of one of the writer's family, who 
was a volunteer during the war with Napoleon) 
centres round a homestead — 




MAIDEN CASTLE, DORCHESTER 



THOMAS HARDY 153 

" In a ferny byway 
Near the great South-Wessex Highway." 

The Romans made a road which the Exeter road 
part used and part supplanted, and Mr. Hardy or his 
characters often travelled on what is known as the 
Ikling or Icen Way, "where Legions had wayfared." 
But in two poems he sees himself and his forefathers 
upon it. He says in " The Roman Road ": 

" But no tall brass-helmed legionnaire 
Haunts it for me. Uprises there 
A mother's form upon my ken, 
Guiding my infant steps as when 
We walked that ancient thoroughfare, 

The Roman Road." 

In "A Wet Night" he describes himself, "the rain- 
shafts riddling" him, so that he exclaims : 

" ' This is a hardship to be calendared !' 

Yet sires of mine now perished and forgot. 
When worse beset, ere roads were shapen here, 
And night and storm were foes indeed to fear. 
Times numberless have trudged across this spot 
In sturdy muteness on their strenuous lot, 
And taking all such toils as trifles mere." 

Therefore I should be more likely to think of Mr. 
Hardy on this road than of Henchard, and in Dor- 
chester, too, when — 

" Midnight clears High Street of all but the ghosts 
Of its buried burghees, 
From the latest far back to those old Roman hosts 

W^hose remains one yet sees, 
Who loved, laughed, and fought, hailed their friends, 
drank their toasts. 
At their meeting times here. . . ." 

For Mr. Hardy has really done something to quicken 
and stouten the sense of past times and generations. 



154 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

With him it has been a passion, the feeling for the 
barrows on the downs, for example : 

" Where the sleek herds trampled daily the remains of flint- 
tipt arrows, 
Mid the thyme and camomiles." 

And that is partly why the name is not redundant in 
" The Dark- Eyed Gentleman," where the girl with her 
baby recalls : 

" I pitched my day's leazings in Crimmercrock Lane, 
To tie up my garter and jog on again. ..." 

The old name softens the ribald flavour and deepens 
the tone of "my days are not sad." But who would go 
to look for that lane at Cattistock ? It would be more 
natural to go to i6, Westbourne Park Villas, where 
Mr. Hardy dates some of his early love-poems of 1866 
and 1867. Certainly the address is more effective than 
any fancy name, and is not so far away from Wessex 
as it would look on the map, were anyone to insert it 
on the outskirts of Mr. Hardy's country. 



HILAIRE BELLOC 

MR. BELLOC'S country is Western Europe, and 
in particular Sussex. He sees it as a Catholic, 
an historian, a French artilleryman, a walker, a rider, 
a yachtsman. " Everywhere in the world," he says — 
and Thoreau and Jefferies have said something like 
it — *' one can look in and in and never find an end to 
one's delight. . . . But England is especially a garden 
of this sort, or a storehouse. . . ." In another place 
he says : " In every inch of England you can find the 
history of England." His home as a boy was between 
the Sussex downs and the sea ; he spent four or five 
years at Oxford ; he has explored the Pilgrims' Way, 
the Stane Street, the Thames, half the hills and 
rivers of England, and much of the coast ; he lives 
in the Sussex Weald. Thus he has a special sense 
of England, heightened, perhaps, beyond what it is 
in other Englishmen by his birth in France, and 
the sense which made him give a cry when he saw 
right above him from the Channel, " through what was 
now a thick haze, the cliffs of England, perhaps two 
miles away, and showing very faintly indeed, a bare 
outline upon the white weather," and "a thought ran 
into his mind with violence, how, one behind the other, 
beyond known things, beyond history, the men from 
whom he came had greeted this sight after winds like 

I5S 



156 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

these, and danger, and the crossing of the narrow seas." 
In the essay *' On Dropping Anchor " he pictures him- 
self coming to a last anchorage in his small boat at 
evening amid a " distant echo of the surf from the high 
hills " : 

"The fair-way into that haven shall lie behind a 
pleasant little beach of shingle, which shall run aslant 
into the sea from the steep hillside, and shall be a 
breakwater made by God. The tide shall run up be- 
hind it smoothly, and in a silent way, filling the great 
hollow of the hills, brimming it all up like a cup — a 
cup of refreshment and of quiet, a cup of ending." 

His books are full of home and of travel in equal 
measure. Often enough he describes, not too much 
or too often, for he seldom falls below the level of such 
a passage as this : 

" The wind was blowing splendidly through an air 
quite blue and clear for many miles, and growing 
clearer as the afternoon advanced in gladness. It was 
a sea-wind that had been a gale the day before, but 
during the night everything had changed in South 
England, and the principal date of the year was passed, 
the date which is the true beginning of the year. The 
mist of the morning had scudded before thick Atlantic 
weather; by noon it was lifted into clouds, by mid- 
afternoon those clouds were large, heralding clouds of 
Spring against an unbounded capacity of sky. There 
was no longer any struggle between them and the 
gale ; they went by this in procession over the country 
and towards the east." 

He paints by precise small coloured touches, and by 
larger vaguer strokes coloured, if at all, from his own 



HILAIRE BELLOC 15; 

spirit, his sense of history and of home. Himself, 
travelling or at ease, appears more clearly than the 
land and sea, and dominates it. The Griffin at March 
— ** Low rooms of my repose ! Beams of comfort 
and great age ; drowsy and inhabiting fires ; ingle- 
nooks made for companionship " — might have been any 
other good inn which he chose to honour with his com- 
pany and an essay. For a style so substantial and of 
so many verbs it is astonishing how philosophical and 
spiritual the results are. To bring the White Hart 
at Wisbech before us, he can trust to saying that he was 
waiting there for steak and onions, reading a book ; or 
he will tell a man merely that " Down under the 
Combe at Duncton is a very good inn "; of The Sign 
of the Lion, an inn " that stands close to the Upper 
Arun and is very good," he tells us nothing more literal 
than that the food and ale " was of the kind which has 
been England ever since England began, and which 
perhaps good-fortune will preserve over the breakdown 
of our generation, until we have England back again." 
He is just too much concerned with what England has 
been and may be again, with how it should be enjoyed, 
with an idea of England, to leave us quite a clear vision 
of England as he has known it. Tasted England he 
has deeply, like Cobbett and Mr. Hudson, but not pre- 
served it for later generations as they have. 

" Unless a man understands the Weald, he cannot 
easily write about the beginnings of England " — " the 
people of Sussex have gone steadily forward, increasing 
in every good thing, until they are now by far the first 
and most noble of all the people in the world " — so he 
lays it down, and we know that he would have spoken 



158 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

as generously of Rutland had he dwelt there. Sussex 
is the sweet core of the world, and he is the fortunate 
inhabitant who has crept into it. He praises it as 
Gerald of Wales praises Manorbier, which is in Pem- 
broke, which is the best county in Wales, which is the 
best land in the world. 

Well, many a man has made less of the things he 
loves by not being able to make much of himself, the 
lover ; and though I have a notion that he protests too 
much, with all his humour, I listen humbly and in 
delight when he speaks of " our grass " — of the little 
winds '' who brought with them the scent of those first 
flowers in the North Wood, or beyond Gumber Corner, 
and the fragrance of our grass, the savour which the 
sheep know at least, however much the visitors to my 
dear home ignore it." I like to see him mowing a field, 
and a man asking him, " Mowing?" and him answering, 
*' Ar," " for so we speak to each other in the stenes of 
the downs." When he is not Gascon, he is always 
humorous in his patriotism, no other Englishman so 
much so. Here and there he reveals what he might 
have done had he not been a Sussex man. For example, 
he feels, half an hour after he has left London in a fast 
express north-eastward, that the East Anglians "push 
with quants, they sail in wherries, they inhabit flat 
tidal banks, they are at peace." What an East Anglian 
is lost in him ! 

He has not, however, given up to Sussex what was 
meant for mankind. Going about in other counties, 
he has been glad to step exactly in the footprints of 
ancient ancestors. On the Pilgrims' Way, he says : 
*' I believed that, as I followed their hesitations at the 



HILAIRE BELLOC 159 

river-crossings, as I climbed where they had climbed, 
whence they also had seen a wide plain, as I suffered 
the fatigue they suffered, and laboriously chose, as they 
had chosen, the proper soils for going, something of 
their much keener life would wake again in the blood 
I drew from them, and that in a sort I should forget the 
vileness of my own time, and renew for some few days 
the better freedom of that vigorous morning when men 
were already erect, articulate, and worshipping God, 
but not yet broken by complexity and the long accumu- 
lation of evil." The " differences of this island " fasci- 
nate him. " Surely," he says, " a nation grows great 
in this way, by many provinces reacting one upon the 
other, recognized by the general will, sometimes in 
conflict with it." He is considering the West Country, 
which no one can get into " without touching his youth 
again and putting his fingers to earth, and getting sus- 
tenance from it"; and in the same essay, *'On the 
Approach to Western England," he alludes to the 
Welsh Marches, "and how, between a village and a 
village, one changes from the common English parish, 
with the Squire's house and the church and the 
cottages and all, into the hard slate roofs and the inner 
flame of Wales." When he is living in the Midlands, he 
has sung, "the great hills of the South Country" come 
back into his mind ; but as a rule he is not contentious 
once he is out of Sussex, and plainly he feels that love 
of England which, says he, somewhat mysteriously, 
" has in it the love of landscape, as has the love of no 
other country ; it has in it, as has the love of no other 
country, the love of friends." He dehghts in the variety 
of England as he does in the variety of the separate 



i6o A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

things in an old town, which ** have character as men 
have," which he traces to the power of individuals in 
England, and associates with "ownership, and what 
comes from ownership — the love of home." Again and 
again he reverts to the middle part of the South Downs, 
to Gumber and No Man's Land, the Rother and the 
Arun and Amberley Wildbrooks and to the Weald. 
But his pleasure in reciting long lists of rivers and 
hills, and towns on rivers, northward and westward of 
these is equally noticeable. If he had anything to 
learn from Ruskin in this kind, he learnt it. He is such 
a geographer as I wish many historians were, such a 
poet as all geographers ought to be, and hardly any 
other has been. 



THE WEST COUNTRY 

HERRICK 
COLERIDGE 
W. H. HUDSON 



II 



HERRICK 

WHEN we think of Herrick, we think of Dean 
Prior in Devonshire, where he was Vicar from 
1629 to 1647, and from 1662 until his death in 1674, 
when he was eighty-three. Yet the greater part of his 
life was passed in London. The family was from 
Leicester. Nicholas Herrick, the poet's father, was a 
goldsmith, with a house in Goldsmiths' Row. There 
Robert was born. When his father died from a fall out 
of an upper window of this house, he went to live in 
Wood Street with an uncle, also a goldsmith, and with 
him served an apprenticeship till 1614. Then he went 
to St. John's College, Cambridge. He ceased to be a 
goldsmith. On leaving Cambridge he entered literary 
society, and in particular " the tribe of Ben " — that is 
to say, the company of poets and gentlemen who ac- 
knowledged Ben Jonson's supremacy, and met 

" At those lyric feasts 

Made at the Sun, 
The Dog, the Triple Tun, 

Where we such clusters had 
As made us nobly wild, not mad ; 

And yet each verse of thine 
Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine." 

Jonson lived on until 1637, but Herrick could not 
stay in London so long. How he lived is not known. 
He had well-to-do relatives, but in 1627 he accompanied 

163 



i64 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

the expedition to tiie Isle of Rhe as chaplain, and in 
1629 went into his Devonshire exile. He was then 
thirty-eight, and must have had some good reason for 
dropping himself into so remote and small a place. 

To all appearances he must by that time have been 
a complete Londoner, one who was well used to the 
variety and convenience of the city, and to the safe 
civilized beauty of the suburban country. There is no 
indication that he preferred " old simplicity, though hid 
in grey," to " foppery in plush and scarlet clad," If he 
went to " see the wholesome country girls make hay," 
it was not from any disdain of 

" The beauties of the Cheap, and wives of Lombard Street." 

A "sweet disorder "and "wild civility" in park and 
meadow was probably as pleasant to him as in woman's 
dress, and he could have all that he desired by a short 
journey on foot or in a barge. When he was away at 
Dean Prior, he sent his tears and " supremest kiss " 

" To thee, m}' silver-footed Thamesis. 
No more shall I reiterate thy Strand, 
Whereon so many stately structures stand : 
Nor in the summer's sweeter evenings go 
To bathe in thee as thousand others do ; 
No more shall I along thy crystal glide 
In barge with boughs and rushes beautified, 
With soft, smooth virgins for our chaste disport, 
To Richmond, Kingston, and to Hampton Court. 
Never again shall I with finny oar 
Put from, or draw unto the faithful shore ; 
And landing here, or safely landing there. 
Make way to my beloved Westminster, 
Or to the Golden Cheapside, where the earth 
Of Julia Herrick gave to me my birth. . . ." 

M. Delattre thinks it probable that "Corinna's 
Maying" describes May Day as it was celebrated 



HERRICK 165 

in London in those days, when the young men 
fetched boughs of hawthorn and brier to ornament the 
doors of Cheapside, Cornhill, Gracechurch Street, and 
"every man would walk into the sweet meadows and 
green woods, there to rejoice their spirits with the 
beauty and savour of sweet flowers, and with the 
harmony of birds, praising God in their kind." The 
fourth verse, for example, shows a perfectly suburban 
scene : 

" Come, my Corinna, come ; and coming, mark 
How each field turns a street, each street a park. 

Made green and trimm'd with trees ! See how 

Devotion gives each house a bough 

Or branch ! Each porch, each door, ere this, 

An ark, a tabernacle is, 
Made up of whitethorn, neatly interwove. 
As if here were those cooler shades of love. 

Can such delights be in the street 

And open fields, and we not see't ? 

Come, we'll abroad : and let's obey 

The proclamation made for May, 
And sin no more, as we have done, by staying. 
But, my Corinna, come, let's go a-Maying." 

It is not easy to imagine what more Herrick wanted 
than this combination or alternation of street and park, 
with good company. 

But already in 1610 Herrick had begun to write in 
praise of pure country life. His brother Thomas had 
left London with a bride, and Herrick congratulated 
him on exchanging the city for 

" The country's sweet simplicity : 

And it to know and practise, with intent 

To grow the sooner innocent 
By studying to know virtue, and to aim 

More at her nature than her name." 



i66 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

Possibly at nineteen Herrick really believed that in 
the country all was "purling springs, groves, birds, 
and well-weav'd bowers, with fields enamelled with 
flowers"; that there were none of those "desperate cares 
th' industrious merchant has "; that men there ate only 
" to cool, not cocker appetite," and " content makes all 
ambrosia" — "boiled nettles" and all. But it is more 
likely that Herrick got it all from books. He accepted 
the view that the golden age was not yet over in the 
country, though he must have been pretending when 
he called his Muse a " mad maiden " who might 

" sit and piping please 
The poor and private cottages. . . . 
There, there, perhaps, such lines as these 
May take the simple villages." 



He said, 



" Contempt in courts and cities dwell, 
No critic haunts the poor man's cell," 



but gives us no real reason to believe him when he 
goes on to say, as if he liked it, that in the poor man's 
cell you can hear your own lines read " by no one 
tongue censured." To make neat verses was one of 
his recreations, and so he wrote : 

" To bread and water none is poor ; 
And having these, what need of more ? 
Though much from out the cess be spent, 
Nature with little is content." 

Sometimes he was practically translating, as when he 
bade his worthy friend Thomas Falconbridge 

" Lastly, be mindful, when thou art grown great, 
That towers high rear'd dread most the lightning's threat : 
Whereas the humble cottages not fear 
The cleaving bolt of Jove the Thunderer."^ 



HERRICK 167 

On the other hand, he wrote in the same strain after 
he had been some time in Devonshire; and since it is 
obvious that Dean Prior v/as in many ways rude and 
inconvenient, it is equally obvious that without com- 
pensations he did not sit down in his Vicarage and 
write about " His Content in the Country," with Pru- 
dence Baldwin, his maidservant : 

" Here, here I live with what my board 
Can with the smallest cost afford. 
Though ne'er so mean the viands be, 
They well content my Prew and me. 
Or pea, or bean, or wort, or beet, 
Whatever comes, content makes sweet. 
Here we rejoice, because no rent 
We pay for our poor tenement 
Wherein we rest, and never fear 
The landlord or the usurer. 
The quarter-day does ne'er affright 
Our peaceful slumbers in the night. 
We eat our own and batten more. 
Because we feed on no man's score ; 
But pity those whose flanks grow great, 
Swell'd with the lard of others' meat. 
We bless our fortunes when we see 
Our own beloved privacy ; 
And like our living, where we're known 
To very few, or else to none." 

The compensation probably was a contented mind, 
and his later praise of country life is by this much 
better than his early, that it does tell us something 
about the country as well as exclaiming : 

" O happy Ufe ! if that their good 
The husbandmen but understand." 

He put in the game of " fox i' th' hole," or distinguished 
between the " cockrood " for snaring woodcocks and 



i68 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

the " glade " for catching pheasants, not for local colour 
in an otherwise conventional praise of country life, 
but because these things had become familiar to him ; 
he had really in some measure become a country- 
man. 

If he had not, need he ever have gone back in 1662 
when the King enjoyed his own again ? He had found 
the wherewithal to live in London from the year of his 
ejection, 1647, and he would not have gone back at the 
age of sixty-nine without a strong preference. Dean 
Prior was a very remote village lying close under the 
high south-eastern edge of Dartmoor. The road from 
Exeter to Plymouth passes Herrick's church on the 
left a little more than a mile out of Buckfastleigh. 
Anciently, I believe, the road left Dean Prior Church 
somewhat to the left, but not so far as to be said to 
leave it in the mud even in days of villainous roads. 
To-day the railway misses it and the hill beyond it by 
making a sharp detour down the valley of the Dart 
from Buckfastleigh. 

No trace of Herrick is left in the hamlet except an 
epitaph, not his own, but one written by him for his 
neighbours. Sir Edward and Lady Giles, of Dean Court. 
Their effigies kneel facing one another in the costume 
of Charles I.'s reign, and underneath have been cut 
these words : 

" No trust to metals nor to marbles, when 
Those have their fate and wear away as men ; 
Times, titles, trophies may be lost and spent, 
But virtue rears the eternal monument. 
What more than these can tombs or tombstones pay ? 
But here's the sunset of a tedious day : 
These two asleep are : I'll but be undress'd, 
And so to bed : pray wish us all good rest" 



HERRICK 169 

Herrick was truly himself only on the subject of 
flowers, domestic things, and women. For his own 
epitaph he had addressed the Robin Redbreast, asking 
it to cover him with leaves and moss-work, and sing 
his dirge, and write in foliage these words : 

*' Here, here the tomb of Robin Herrick is," 

Had the task been left to the birds, the result could not 
have been less to-day. Neither stone nor epitaph 
marks the grave of Herrick. But the church remains 
among beeches, and Dean Court, now a farm, and the 
Vicarage. Here he wrote and thanked God for it, and 
for his bread, his firing, 

" The worts, the purslain, and the mess 
Of watercress," 

and his "beloved beet," the spiced drink, the corn from 
the glebe, the hen that laid an egg a day, the ewes 
that bore twins every year, the kine that " run cream 
for wine." This was " His Grange, or Private Wealth ": 

" Though clock, 
To tell how night draws hence, I've none, 

A cock 
I have to sing how day draws on. 

I have 
A maid, my Prew, by good luck sent 

To save 
That little Fates me gave or lent. 

A hen 
I keep, which, creeking day by day, 

Tells when 
She goes her long white egg to lay. 

A goose 
I have, which with a jealous ear 

Lets loose 
Her tongue to tell that danger's near. 



I70 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

A lamb 
I keep (tame) with my morsels fed, 

Whose dam 
An orphan left him (lately dead). 

A cat 
I keep that plays about my house, 

Grown fat 
With eating many a miching mouse. 

To these 
A Tracy I do keep whereby 

I please 
The more my rural privacy ; 

Which are 
But toys to give my heart some ease ; 

Where care 
None is, slight things do lightly please." 

Tracy was his spaniel. That hen must have been such 
a wonder that it can be understood how he came to 
compare Julia's leg to that daily '* long white egg.'' 
The cat, too, is very real. He must have been a lover 
of cats, for in his earliest poem, that to his brother on 
country life, he speaks of the roof that maintains a fire- 
side cricket choir, 

" And the brisk mouse may feast herself with crumbs 
Till that Ihe green-eyed kitten comes." 

Outside the Vicarage he does not stray far. If he 
" traced the hare i' th' treacherous snow," he gives us 
no idea of the sport or of the country. Perhaps he 
was short-sighted, for he seems to see very clearly 
little things which he could not have seen at all without 
special attention. His daffodils have not Wordsworth's 
wild moorland air. They are just flowers isolated, 
but they are as real as Wordsworth's. Real, too, is 
that '* savour like unto a blessed field," 

" when the bedabbled morn 
Washes the golden ears of corn.' 



HERRICK 171 

No poet ever loved perfumes more, indoors and out 

of doors, the breaths of flowers, of spices, of w^omen, 

of bees, of amber, of burning wood, of wine, of milk 

and cream, of baked pear. 

He confessed or professed that his eye and heart 

doted " less on Nature than on Art," and declared — in 

writing to an old London friend. Sir Clipseby Crew — 

that since coming to the country he had lost his 

"former flame." But, then, on the other hand, he 

wrote : 

" More discontents I never had 
Since I was born than here, 
Where I have been, and still am sad, 

In this dull Devonshire ; 
Yet, justly too, I must confess 

I ne'er invented such 
Ennobled numbers for the press 
Than where I loathed so much." 

Did he show this to Sir Clipseby? Probably not. 
What he said to the knight was very different : 

" Cold and hunger never yet 
Could a noble verse beget ; 
But your bowle with sack replete, 
Give me these, my knight, and try 
In a minute's space how I 
Can run mad and prophesy," 

Too much has been made of his insulting farewell 
" to Dean Bourn, a rude river in Devon, by which 
sometimes he lived." Perhaps he got splashed in 
crossing it on his way to London, and wrote these 
verses against the savage Devonians just to amuse the 
Londoners. Or he might have been badly treated at 
the ejection in 1647. In any case, a great measure of 
eagerness in looking forward to London might have 



172 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

been expected, and a proportionate disgust with what- 
ever thwarted or delayed him ** in loathed Devon- 
shire." When he set foot in London "from the dull 
confines of the drooping West," he exclaimed : 

" O fruitful Genius ! that bestowest here 
An everlasting plenty year by year. 

place ! O people ! manners ! framed to please 
All nations, customs, kindreds, languages ! 

1 am a free-born Roman ; suffer, then, 
That I amongst you live a citizen. 

London my home is, though by hard fate sent 
Into a long and irksome banishment. . . ." 

This, I think, was mainly an exercise for London 
eyes. It is rather less than more sincere sounding 
than his praises of a country life. 

How much he wrote at Dean Prior will never be 
known certainly. But the poem "To the Little 
Spinners " must have been ; and the one on "Oberon's 
Palace," where Oberon and Mab are " led by the shine 
of snails " ; and " Oberon's Eeast," with its " papery 
butterflies" and "the unctuous dewlaps of a snail." 
The rural poems were obviously written there, poems 
like "The Hock-Cart, or Harvest Home," with its 
picture of labourers devoutly following the waggon, 
while others, 

" less attent 
To prayers than to merriment, 
Run after with their breeches rent . . ." 

and then the great feast, the 

" large and chief 
Foundation of your feast, fat beef : 
With upper stories, mutton, veal. 
And bacon. . . ." 



HERRICK 173 

The conclusion seems to prove him a thorough 
countryman of the landowning or employing class ; 
for he bids the labourers work after their holiday, 
because 

" Feed him ye must, whose food fills you ; 
And that this pleasure is like grain, 
Not sent ye for to drown your pain, 
But for to make it spring again." 

He was not without company. Among his friends 
was John Weekes, Dean of St. Burian in Cornwall. 
He visited this man's house, and either there or at 
Dean Prior would sit with him regretting past times, 
but drinking until they were 

" Plump as the cherry, 
Though not so fresh, yet full as merry 
As the cricket," 

until they saw 

" the fire less shine 
From th' embers than the kitling's eyne." 

Prue Baldwin, his maidservant, never forsook him ; 
others, mere "summer birds" of passage, soon flew 
away, but not she. He did her the honour to waste 
his scholarship in these lines on her sickness : 

" Prue, my dearest maid, is sick 
Almost to be lunatic : 
^sculapius ! come and bring 
Means for her recovering ; 
And a gallant cock shall be 
Offered up by her to thee." 

It seems impossible to guess whether Julia or 
Anthea ever lived in the same house with him. Or 
could Prue supply suggestions for those ladies as well 
as light the fires and cook the dinners ? For a time 



174 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

Elizabeth Herrick, widow of his brother Thomas, kept 
house for him. Julia, at least, was a substantial and 
not a transitory person, and when he bids her make 
the wedding cake for a bride, it looks as if she were an 
inmate, whether subordinate or not, at the Vicarage. 
And there is a quite exceptional touch of reality in the 
protestation to Julia, .."here he says : 

" As if we should for ever part. ... 
After a day or two or three, 
I would come back and live with thee." 

At Dean Court the Gileses had no children, but they 
had nieces living with them, and doubtless other 
visitors coming and going. He wrote " The Enter- 
tainment : or Porch-Verse " for the marriage of one 
niece, Lettice Yarde ; and a " Meadow-Verse : or Anni- 
versary " for another, Bridget Lowman. Many times 
in the manor-house at Dean Court, now a farmhouse, 
Herrick must have seen the holly up. He paints the 
holly and the rosemary and bay, but not the hall or the 
house ; as he paints the flowers and a typical meadow, 
but not Dartmoor. In fact, there seems no connexion 
between Herrick and Dean Prior, except that he lived 
there over thirty years. It does not remind us of him, 
nor does his work remind us of it. But the association 
is growing up, and already it is a piquant, pleasant 
thing to fancy, or to try to establish, the connexion 
between the southern foot of Dartmoor and the author 
of those daintiest poems to flowers and ladies. 



COLERIDGE 

WHEN Coleridge was twenty-five and dedicating 
his poems to his brother, the Rev. George 
Coleridge, of Ottery St. Mary, Devon, he said : 

" A blessed lot hath he, who, having past 
His youth and early manhood in the stir 
And turmoil of the world, retreats at length, 
With cares that move, not agitate the heart. 
To the same dwelling where his father dv^relt ; 
And haply views his tottering little ones 
Embrace those aged knees, and climb that lap. 
On which first kneeling his own infancy 
Lisped its brief prayer. Such, O my earliest friend ! 
Thine and thy brothers' favourable lot." 

It was far from being his own lot. His father died 
in 1 78 1, and the child, then nine years old, left Ottery 
St. Mary for London, and saw it again only on holidays. 
Thus the place appeared in his memory perfected and 
enshrined by the fixed school years in London and the 
restless years following. Years afterwards, in 1803, 
when he was living beside the Greta, and not the 
Otter, a calf bellowing on a July evening reminded 
him of Ottery : '* Instantly came on my mind that 
night 1 slept out at Ottery, and the calf in the field 
across the river, whose lowing so deeply impressed 
me." He was then past thirty. Ten years earlier he 

175 



176 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

used to turn his fond retrospection into verses. He 
wrote a sonnet to the River Otter, 

" Dear native brook ! wild streamlet of the West !" 

recalling the game of ducks-and-drakes on it, the plank 
bridge, the sandy bed, the willows which would always 
reappear to him if he shut his eyes in the sun, and wake 
a sigh : 

" Ah ! that once more I were a careless child !" 

In " An Autumnal Evening " he says that, 

" Tost by storms along life's wild'ring way, 
Mine eye reverted views that cloudless day, 
When by my native brook I wont to rove 
While hope with kisses nurs'd the infant love," 

and again he hails the " Dear native brook !" and 
" Scenes of my hope." The Otter's *' sleep-persuading 
stream " is mentioned again in "Songs of the Pixies." 
What we know of Coleridge at Ottery is not much. 
He spent all his early years there, both play hours 
and school hours, for he attended the grammar-school, 
where his father was master. According to his 
account, he took no pleasure in boyish sports, but 
read incessantly. " I used to lie by the wall and 
mope," he said, " and my spirits used to come upon 
me suddenly, and in a flood ; and I then was accus- 
tomed to run up and down the churchyard and act 
over again all I had been reading, on the docks and 
the nettles and the rank grass." Earlier than that, 
in his nurse's arms, he had heard an "old musician, 
blind and grey," 

" His Scottish tunes and warlike marches play," 



COLERIDGE 177 

and had listened to the church-bells ringing, 

" Fi-om morn to evening, all the hot fair-day, 
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me 
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear 
Most like articulate sounds of things to come !" 

For fear of punishment it was that he spent that night 
out by the Otter, and incurred weakness and ague for 
years after. He remembered his father's tears at his 
restoration — "for I was the child of his old age." 
Nothing embittered, but only intensified, his memo- 
ries, but they were comparatively few, the only 
other one of his father and Ottery being connected 
with a walk from a farmhouse a mile away, when the 
old man told him " the names of the stars, and how 
Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world, 
and that the other twinkling stars were suns that had 
worlds rolling round them," and these things sank into 
a mind " habituated to the vast " by early reading 
about fairies and genii. A year afterwards he was 
to quit Devonshire, to begin the life that left him, as 
he thought, 

" Still most a stranger, most with naked heart, 
At mine own home and birthplace." 

For the next ten years, chiefly at Christ's Hospital, 
were to make him a town boy, one who was reared, 
as he did not wish his son Hartley to be, 

"In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim, 
And saw naught lovely but the sky and stars." 

The nine years at Ottery were cut off, a romantic 
islet, from the mainland. That the William Browne 
of Otter}' who died in 1645 might have been the author 
of " Britannia's Pastorals " seems to have helped him 
12 



178 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

to love the poet ; he also claimed that the Coleridges 
were " connected " with the Brownes. 

While he was at Christ's Hospital, Coleridge hardly 
had a home except the homes of friends like Charles 
Lamb and Mrs. Evans and her daughter Mary, and of 
a London uncle named Bowdon. Holidays only set 
him free to bathe in the New River, to take Mary 
Evans, " of a summer morning, the pillage of the flower- 
gardens within six miles from town, with sonnet or 
love-rhymes wrapped round the nosegay," to engage 
strangers in conversation, to expect in vain "towns- 
man, or aunt, or sister more beloved," to walk round 
Newgate Market alone, to watch from the school roof 

" the clouds 
Moving in heaven ; or, of that pleasure tired, 
To shut his eyes, and by internal light 
See trees, and meadows, and his native stream. 
Far distant, thus beheld from year to year 
Of a long exile." 

He began to approach poetry, calling the school pump 
a Pierian spring, reading the verses of William Lisle 
Bowles, translating from Latin and Greek, addressing 
Mary Evans and " sweet Genevieve " and the evening 
star. " O it was," he says, " my earliest affection, the 
evening star ! One of my first ptterances in verse was 
an address to it as I was returning from the New 
River, and it looked newly bathed as well as I. I 
remember that the substance of the sonnet was that 
the woman whom I could ever love would surely have 
been emblemed in the pensive serene brightness of 
that planet ; that we were both constellated to it, and 
would after death return thither." It began : 

"O meek attendant of Sol's setting blaze !" 



COLERIDGE 179 

Coleridge went to Jesus College, Cambridge, in 
1791. We know that he talked there, declaimed pas- 
sages from political pamphlets, and was heard with 
admiration. But Cambridge meant nothing to him in 
particular. The interval between school and college 
he had spent at Ottery, and again the Long Vacation 
of 1793. He ran away for a soldier, enlisting at 
Reading, in 1793, and was not discharged until four 
months later, in 1794. Then in the following summer 
he walked with a friend in Wales, and on the way, 
calling at Oxford, met Southey of Balliol College. 
He stopped at Bristol on his way back, collabo- 
rated with Southey at ''The Fall of Robespierre," 
and got engaged to Sarah Fricker. The following 
March, Southey and Coleridge, their wives, their 
friends and their friends' wives, were to go to found 
the Pantisocracy in America. The Avon at Clifton, 
the nightingales of the Leigh woods, were present 
to Coleridge while he wrote " On the Death of Chatter- 
ton" and " To the Nightingale." He had a short free- 
dom in London, enjoyed, partly with Charles Lamb, 
drink, smoke, and Welsh-rabbit at the Salutation and 
Cat in Newgate Street, and a short return to Miss 
Fricker at Bristol and to the woods "that wave o'er 
Avon's rocky steep," When March came he was 
lodging alone in London, at 25, College Street. 

Many of his " Poems on Various Subjects " had 
now been finished ; " Religious Musings " was being 
written, and the publisher had advanced him thirty 
guineas. The prospect of making fourpence a line by 
verses was one of his excuses for marrying Sarah 
Fricker, which he did in October, 1794. They went to 



i8o A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

live at Clevedon, near Bristol, between the Severn 
sea and the end of the hills. The better part of his 
poetry was to be written by this sea within a few 
years. 

Already his love-poems had taken some of their 
substance from this sea and these hills. Writing at 
Shurton Bars, near Bridgwater, in the month before 
his marriage, he spoke of the Flat Holm, the lighthouse 
island in the Channel, the " channell'd isle " 

" Where stands one solitai-y pile 
Unslated by the blast." 

He fancied himself there alone, 

" In black soul-jaundiced fit 
A sad gloom-pampered man to sit, 
And listen to the roar." 

" The Keepsake," apparently written some years later, 
seems to recall the last summer before his marriage, 
"the tedded hay and corn sheaves in one field," the 
foxgloves, the woodbine bower, and the girl, 

"early waked 
By her full bosom's joyous restlessness," 

coming out to him and promising marriage. The poem 
'* composed at Clevedon, Somersetshire," shows the 
poet and his bride perhaps on a visit a little before 
the wedding, as they sit beside the cottage : 

" Our cot o'ergrown 
With white-flowered jasmin, and the broad-leaved m3Ttle, 
And watch the clouds that late were rich with light, 
Slow-sadd'ning round, and mark the star of eve 
Shine opposite !" 

But the poem as it stands may have been worked at 
before, during and after the marriage month. Their 



COLERIDGE i8i 

stay was brief enough to have been pure sweetness. 
They moved back to Bristol to be nearer books. For 
a year the poet made plans and changes, wrote the 
" Watchman " and dropped it, became a father and had 
his poems at last published, revisited Ottery. He had 
many a restless moment in which to remember Cleve- 
don, the " quiet dell ! dear cot ! and mount sublime !" 

" Here the bleak mount . . . 
The Channel there, the islands and white sails ..." 

and all that he had seen "while climbing the left ascent 
of Brockley Coomb, Somersetshire, May, 1795," when 
he still longed for Sarah. 

The last day of 1796, when his newly-written "Ode to 
the Departing Year " was published, was Coleridge's first 
day in the cottage at Nether Stowey. He had stayed 
before at Stowey with his friend Poole. Now he was 
settling down to cultivate an acre and a half of garden 
and devote his evenings to literature, and we have his 
own word for it that the spade produced " a callum " on 
each hand. He already knew something of the country 
between Stowey and Bristol. Henceforward he ranged 
rather westward and over the Quantocks, but the 
presence of Mrs. Barbauld was enough to induce him 
to walk to Bristol, and he walked the forty miles home 
in one day. When Hazlitt came over, Coleridge walked 
and talked him to Linton, thirty-five miles. He used 
to walk over to Bridgwater and Taunton to preach. 

One of his most famous walks was over the Dorset 
border to Wordsworth at Racedown. So eager was 
he that he " leapt over a gate and bounded down the 
pathless field " to cut off the last corner. The two 
poets had met before, and Coleridge had admired 



i82 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

Wordsworth ever since his first book. By the visit to 
Racedown their friendship was made sure. Words- 
worth was then at work on "The Borderers," Cole- 
ridge on " Osorio " ; but in the year of friendship 
following they were to do incomparable things. 
Wordsworth and his sister, having repaid the visit, 
came to Alfoxden, near Stowey, to stay in July, 1797. 

It was while the Wordsworths were with Coleridge 
in June that Lamb arrived at Nether Stowey. Cole- 
ridge, for the time being disabled from walking, sat in 
" this lime-tree bower my prison," and followed in im- 
agination the walk which his friends were taking, and 
wrote a poem on it, half " gloom-pampered " at his 
deprivation, half happy both with what he imagined 
and with the trees of his prison, so that he concluded : 

" Henceforth I shall know 
That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure ; 
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there, 
No waste so vacant, but may well employ 
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart 
Awake to Love and Beauty." 

His less famous poems of the period are full of this 
country, from Stowey, 

" Thy church tower, and, methinks, the four huge elms 
Clustering which mark the mansion of my friend"* 

and his own cottage, to the Quantocks, " sea, hill, and 
wood," with details of 

" The fruit-like perfume of the golden furze," 

the rocks, the firs and slender oaks and birches, the 
whortleberries, the nightingales, the waterfall, the 

* Thomas Poole. 



COLERIDGE 183 

spring — that beautiful fountain at Upper Stowey 
where " the images of the weeds which hung down 
from its sides appear as plants growing up, straight 
and upright, among the water-weeds that really grew 
from the bottom of the well." Even in " Remorse" the 
Moresco chieftain's wife seems to be addressing the 
Quantocks and the Bristol Channel, when she says : 

" Yon hanging woods, that touched by autumn seem 
As they were blossoming hues of fire and gold ; 
The flower-like woods, most lovely in decay, 
The many clouds, the sea, the rock, the sands, 
Lie in the silent moonshine ; and the owl, 
(Strange ! very strange !) the screech-owl only wakes ! 
Sole voice, sole eye of all this world of beauty I" 

Isn't this the same country as the Ancient Mariner sees, 
coming in perhaps near Quantoxhead ? — 

" The rock shone bright, the kirk no less, 
That stands above the rock : 
The moonlight steeped in silentness 
The steady weathercock. 

" And the bay was white with silent light . . ." 

On that coast you will find the wood "which slopes 
down to the sea," in those coombes the hermit's 
"cushion plump" : 

" It is the moss that wholly hides 
The rotted old oak-stump ;" 

and the oak where Christabel kneels in the moonlight 
when 

" Naught was green upon the oak 
But moss and rarest mistletoe." 

The "jagged shadows of mossy leafless boughs " in the 
moonlight and the crying of the owls from cliff and 



i84 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

tower are more likely to have come from the Quan- 
tocks than from nowhere. And so with " The Ballad 
of the Dark Ladie," where for the third time he uses 
that mossy seat : 

" Beneath j^on birch with silver bark, 
And boughs so pendulous and fair, 
The brook falls scattered down the rock : 
And all is mossy there ! 

" And there upon the moss she sits, 
The Dark Ladie in silent pain. ..." 

That ** the one red leaf, the last of its clan," hung on a 
Somerset tree is well known, because a note of it occurs 
in Dorothy Wordsworth's journal. Walks with Cole- 
ridge helped to fill her journal at Alfoxden. His water- 
fall and the weeds swaying in its winnow appear in her 
note for February ib, 1798. Alter sunlight to moon- 
light, and this scene from February 17 comes very close 
to that of " Christabel" : 

" The sun shone bright and clear. A deep stillness 
in the thickest part of the wood, undisturbed except by 
the occasional dropping of the snow from the holly 
boughs ; no other sound but that of the water and the 
slender notes of a redbreast, which sang at intervals on 
the outskirts of the southern side of the wood. There 
the bright green moss was bare at the roots of the 
trees, and the little birds were upon it. The whole 
appearance of the wood was enchanting, and each tree, 
taken singly, was beautiful. The branches of the hollies 
pendent with their white burden, but still showing their 
bright red berries and their glossy green leaves. The 
bare branches of the oaks thickened by the snow." 

On a walk with Wordsworth and Dorothy to Watchet 
and Linton " The Ancient Mariner " was begun in 



COLERIDGE 185 

November, 1797. It was finished, as Dorothy's journal 
says, in March, 1798. The entries relating to "the one 
red leaf, the last of its clan," etc., are supposed to 
" show, not only how much Coleridge was aided by 
her keen observation of Nature, but fix unmistakably 
the date of composition of Part I." of "Chrisiabel." 
The May of 1798 was probably the month of " Kubla 
Khan." Coleridge had retired to a lonely farmhouse 
between Porlock and Linton. He fell asleep under 
the influence of opium while reading in Purchas the 
sentence, " Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace 
to be built, and a stately garden thereunto, and thus ten 
miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall." 
The poem was composed during the sleep, and would 
not, said Coleridge, have been so short and a fragment 
had not "a person on business from Porlock" inter- 
rupted him. The " deep romantic chasm which slanted 
down the green hill " alone connects it, and that tenu- 
ously, with Somerset. If Dorothy Wordsworth did 
help Coleridge to the isthmus by which he and we 
pass out from this earth to that other, she performed a 
great service, perhaps one he could not have done 
without ; but it has not been proved yet. 

This being a time of ^war as well as of poetry, the 
rambles of the poets brought them under suspicion as 
spies. How was a plain man to know that Coleridge 
" liked to compose in walking over uneven ground or 
breaking through the straggling branches of a copse- 
wood " ? The suspicion seems to have turned Words- 
worth out of his house, and he did not find another to 
suit him in the neighbourhood. The Stowey period 
was almost at an end. The Wordsworths went to 



i86 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

Germany before the end of 1798 ; Coleridge went with 
them. Coleridge stayed on into June, 1799, and in a 
year's time he was at Greta Hall, Keswick; Words- 
worth at Town End, Grasmere. 

The spies who suspected Coleridge had not read his 
"Fears in Solitude, written in April, 1798, during the 
Alarm of an Invasion." It shows us that, though a bad 
soldier, he was a tolerably complete Englishman, aware 
of the follies both of peace and war, himself once prob- 
ably one of those who speak from the newspapers 

" As if the soldier died without a wound." 

Having humbled himself and felt his country's need of 
humility, he came on that April day to a most vivid 
sense of what his country was : 

"O dear Britain ! O my Mother Isle! 
Needs must thou prove a name most dear and holy 
To me a son, a brother, and a friend, 
A husband and a father ! who revere 
All bonds of natural love, and find them all 
Within the limits of thy rocky shores. 
O native Britain ! O my Mother Isle ! 
How shouldst thou prove aught else but dear and holy 
To me, who from thy lakes and mountain-hills, 
Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas. 
Have drunk in all my intellectual life, 
All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts. 
All adoration of the God in nature, 
All lovely and all honourable things, 
Whatever makes this mortal spirit feel 
The joy and greatness of its future being ? 
There lives nor form nor feeling in my soul 
Unborrowed from my country. . . ." 

He reminds us what a sense of England there was 
behind the eye that delighted luxuriously in " a green 
and silent spot amid the hills," a "deep romantic chasm," 



COLERIDGE 187 

a wood " that slopes down to the sea." He had as 
little as possible of the enjoyment of historical asso- 
ciation which a guide to Stratford or Carnarvon Castle 
could satisfy, but at times " uncalled and sudden, 
subject to no bidding of my own or others," the 
thoughts of such association "would come upon me 
like a storm, and fill the place with something more 
than Nature." As he could enjoy this earth with 
another, so he could the human language of patriotism 
with an *' eternal language " heard 

" By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags 
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds." 

And he was good at both worlds. His work retains 
a stronger flavour of the West Country than any other 
great poet's. 

Wordsworth's country had little to give him, or he 
had little power to receive. He went backwards and 
forwards from Greta Hall to Dove Cottage. He walked, 
fished, and talked, with the Wordsworths, read them 
" Christabel," and reread it. When the Words- 
worths toured Scotland in 1803 he was with them for 
a time, but forsook them for the sole companionship of 
opium ; he walked two hundred and sixty-three miles 
in eight days between Tyndrum and Perth. His 
poetry neared its decline. If it tastes of the North 
Country, it is through the names chiefly. The first part 
of " Christabel " has no place-names in it ; the second 
part, written in the North, has Bratha Head, Wynder- 
mere, Langdale Pike, Tryermaine, Knorren Moor, 
Irthing Flood, Borrowdale, names from the country 
which Coleridge explored with Wordsworth in 1799. 
' Greta, dear domestic stream," is mentioned in " Recol- 



i88 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

lections of Love," but more as a symbol, and far less 
for itself, than " seaward Quantock's heathy hills." 
Where he is at his best again, in " Dejection," he is 
again close to reality, hearing the wind rave, and 
thinking of 

" Bare craig, or mountain tairn, or blasted tree, 
Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb, 
Or lonely house, long held the witches' home." 

His notebooks reveal how much he saw, and 
thought to use in writing, and never did : the 
crescent moon with the concave filled up by her own 
hazy light, " as if it had been painted and the colours 
had run " — the moon behind a black cloud at sunrise, 
and " a small cloud in the east, not larger than the 
moon and ten times brighter than she" — the moon and 
the sky again and again — the snow on Skiddaw and 
Grysdale Pike for the first time on October 20, which 
he believed to be his birthday — the October masses of 
" shapeless vapour upon the mountains (O the per- 
petual forms of Borrowdale !)," Vv'hile the birds sang 
" in the tender rain, as if it were the rain of April, and 
the decaying foliage were flowers and blossoms." As 
he sat writing at Greta Hall he saw magnificent things. 
He became " no novice in mountain mischiefs." Books 
were all about him. The Wordsworths were usually 
accessible. Charles and Mary Lamb came to see him 
once. There were moments when at home all was 
"Peace and Love." As late as 1803 he could say: 
'* In simple earnestness, 1 never find myself alone, 
within the embracement of rocks and hills, a traveller 
up an alpine road, but my spirit careers, drives, and 
eddies, like a leaf in autumn ; a wild activity of 



COLERIDGE 189 

thoughts, imaginations, feelings, and impulses of 
motion, rises up within me. . . ," But Coleridge did 
not get on with his wife ; he took opium ; he had 
passed thirty, and not reached forty. He went to 
Malta. He lectured in London. He revisited Stowey. 
** The Friend," it is true, issued from Greta Hall. But 
by 1 8 10 Coleridge had fallen back on London, whence 
he could go to Bristol to lecture, or to Calne to write 
" Biographia Literaria," and by chance to see his 
own " Remorse " acted there by a travelling company. 
From Calne he went to Highgate, to the Gillmans, in 
1 8 16, and he stopped there till he was quite dead. 
With Lamb for company he could still walk twelve 
miles; he even wrote "The Garden of Boccaccio," and 
could taste the spring, but he was a man in exile, and 
had been once he decided to follow Wordsworth out 
of the West. 



W. H. HUDSON 

ONCE upon a time there was much talk about the 
supposed incompatibility of science with poetry. 
In a few years, if it was not already dead, the poetry 
was to die of eating from the tree of knowledge. One 
of the best rebukes to this talk was the case of Mr. 
W. H. Hudson, author of " Idle Days in Patagonia," 
"The Naturalist in La Plata," "Birds and Man," 
" Nature in Downland," " Hampshire Days," " The 
Land's End," " Afoot in England "; also of " Green 
Mansions : A Romance of the Tropical Forest," and 
*' The Purple Land." For Mr. Hudson is a poet and 
a man of science. His work on South America was 
described by Dr. Russel Wallace as " a storehouse of 
facts and observations of the greatest value to the 
philosophic naturalist, while to the general reader it 
will rank as the most interesting and delightful of 
modern books on natural history "; he has also written 
some of the most romantic stories of this age, and a 
great body of books depicting English wild hfe with 
an exactness and enthusiasm both unrivalled and in 
combination unapproached. But although generation 
after generation of schoolboys know his " British 
Birds," and everyone remembers " Idle Days in 
Patagonia," because it seems an odd place to be idle 
in, Mr. Hudson has so far concealed himself from the 

190 



W. H. HUDSON 191 

public almost as successfully as he conceals himself 
from both birds and men out of doors. 

Mr. Hudson began by doing an eccentric thing for 
an English naturalist. He was born in South America. 
He opened his study of birds on the Pampas, and as 
a boy discovered a species which has since been named 
after him. When he had been twenty-six years in 
England, he could still see with his mind's eye two 
hundred birds of La Plata and Patagonia as distinctly 
as he could the thrush, the starling, and the robin, and 
could hear with his mind's ear the voices of a hundred 
and fifty. That was thirteen years ago. And he is 
still indignant at the loss of the great birds, especially 
the soaring birds, which he knew in South America, 
and can never see here. But forty years in England, 
and English blood on both sides — though on the 
mother's side it was Americanized — have not turned 
Mr. Hudson into the sort of Englishman that it is a 
pleasure to make a lion of. Himself has told us, and 
has oftener made us feel, that he is one of " a dying 
remnant of a vanished people," '* strangers and cap- 
tives " in a world whose language and customs and 
thoughts are not theirs. "The blue sky, the brown 
soil beneath, the grass, the trees, the animals, the 
wind, and rain, and sun, and stars, are never strange 
to me," he says in " Hampshire Days"; he has none of 
" that ' world-strangeness ' which William Watson and 
his fellow-poets prattle in rhyme about "; he feels the 
strangeness where men with " pale civilized faces," 
eagerly talking about things that do not concern him, 
are crowded together, while he feels a kinship with 
*' the dead, who were not as these ; the long, long 



!92 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

dead, the men who knew not life in towns, and felt no 
strangeness in sun and wind and rain." Jefferies also 
evoked these men from their graves upon the downs, 
but Mr. Hudson is perfectly original, and makes those 
prehistoric figures with " pale furious faces " more 
alive than Jefferies did. Nor is this a whim of Mr. 
Hudson's. A passage in his last book, "Adventures 
among Birds," shows how ready he is to enter into 
prehistoric life. There it is for the sake of the various 
and innumerable birds of the undrained fens of 
Lincolnshire and Somersetshire that he travels " by 
devious ways over the still water, by miles and leagues 
of grey rushes and sedges vivid green, and cat's-tail 
and flowering rush and vast dank bulrush beds, and 
islets covered with thickets of willow and elder and 
trees of larger growth." His vision of that great 
sonorous nation of birds is beautiful. It is not the 
less wonderful that he is a man with a really potent 
sense of historical time, so potent that he seems to 
possess, and to employ most grimly at times, " a con- 
sciousness of the transitoriness of most things human," 
as when he sees without sadness or anger " the wild 
ancient charm" of Salisbury Plain partially exiled. 
Nevertheless, his taste is for " better, less civilized 
days." He is, in fact, one of the few writers who 
could be called a child of Nature without offending 
either him or the other children, one of the few who 
could speak of " earth which is our home " without 
rhodomontade. So much does he know of men and 
beasts on the earth and under the earth. He is even 
a little grim, as towards the " pale civilized people," 
towards the " ordinary unobservant " man. 



W. H. HUDSON 193 

But he is equally impatient of the romantic who 
has been nourished on books alone. For example, he 
quotes a gipsy's words : " You know what the books 
say, and we don't. But we know other things that are 
not in the books, and that's what we have. It's ours, 
our own, and you can't know it." But he will not have 
it that there is anything mysterious in the gipsy's 
faculty: it is "the animal's cunning, a special, a sub- 
limated cunning, the fine flower of his whole nature," 
and has " nothing mysterious in it." Then he laughs : 
" It is not so much the wind on the heath, brother, as 
the fascination of lawlessness, which makes his life 
an everlasting joy to him ; to pit himself against game- 
keeper, farmer, policeman, and everybody else, and 
defeat them all ; to flourish like the parasitic fly on the 
honey in the hive and escape the wrath of the bees." 
What pleases him in the gipsy is his gipsyism, the 
very root of those differences which, superficially 
or romantically observed, give rise to " the romance 
and poetry which the scholar-gipsy enthusiasts are 
fond of reading into him." He professes himself a 
naturalist in these formidable terms. "He" (the 
gipsy) " is to me a wild, untameable animal of curious 
habits, and interests me as a naturalist accordingly." 

But there are naturahsts and naturalists. In Mr. 
Hudson curiosity is a passion, or, rather, it is part of 
the greater passion of love. He loves what things 
are. That is to say, he loves life, not merely portions 
selected and detached by past generations of writers. 
Take, for example, what he says of insects in " Hamp- 
shire Days." He has pronounced " the society of 
indoor people unutterably irksome" to him on account 
13 



194 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

of the " indoor mind," which sees most insects as 
pests. But, says he, without insects, without "this 
innumerable company that each ' deep in his day's 
employ ' are ever moving swiftly or slowly about me, 
their multitudinous small voices united into one deep 
continuous i^olian sound, it would indeed seem as if 
some mysterious malady or sadness had come upon 
Nature. Rather would I feel them alive, teasing, 
stinging, and biting me; rather would I walk in all 
green and flowering places with a cloud of gnats and 
midges ever about me." He so loves the humming- 
bird hawk-moth that he retains in his mind a lovely 
picture of the insect " suspended on his misty wings 
among the tall flowers in the brilliant August sun- 
shine." The image came up as he was introduced to 
a " lepidopterist " who proceeded to tell him that this 
season he had only seen three humming-bird hawk- 
moths, and that he had " secured " all three. In the 
presence of this super-moth he calls himself " a simple 
person whose interest and pleasure in insect life the 
entomologist would regard as quite purposeless." 

What he reverences and loves is the earth, and the 
earth he knows is, humanly speaking, everlasting. He 
is at home wherever grass grows, and he has hardly 
a trace of an amiable " weakness " for particular places. 
In fact, at times he is detached enough to be a con- 
noisseur, as when he says that the Wiltshire Downs 
may be neglected, " since, if downs are wanted, there 
is the higher, nobler Sussex range within an hour of 
London." Yet in Hampshire he speaks of villages on 
the Test and Itchen where he could spend " long years 
in perfect contentment"; and in Wiltshire, among those 



W. H. HUDSON 195 

very downs, he experienced a home feeling — the vast, 
undulating vacant land won him through its resem- 
blances to his early home : " I can note," says he in 
" A Shepherd's Life," " many differences, but they do 
not deprive me of this home feeling; it is the like- 
nesses that hold me, the spirit of the place, one which 
is not a desert with the desert's melancholy or sense 
of desolation, but inhabited, although thinly, and by 
humble-minded men whose work and dwellings are 
unobtrusive. The final effect of this wide green space 
with signs of human life and labour in it, and sight of 
animals — sheep and cattle — at various distances, is that 
we are not aliens here, intruders or invaders on the 
earth, living in it but apart, perhaps hating and spoiling 
it, but with the other animals are children of Nature, 
like them living and seeking our subsistence under 
her sky, familiar with her sun and wind and rain." 
And, again, in " Afoot in England," he mentions that 
the lowing of cattle, on account of early association, 
is more to him than any other natural sound. 

Once he admits that " the West Country has the 
greatest attraction " for him ; but he writes of all the 
southern counties, and does not disdain the eastern 
or the midland counties. During these forty years he 
has seen England as few writers have since Cobbett. 
He has written about counties as far apart as Kent 
and Cornwall, Derbyshire and Dorsetshire, Norfolk 
and Monmouthshire. In all counties he has been at 
home with the wild life. He has visited places con- 
nected with his predecessors — White, Cobbett, and 
Jefferies. But 1 should not say that his " country " 
embraces all the counties. Thus, Cornwall is foreign 



196 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

to him. His ** Land's End " is an uncomfortable, un- 
sympathetic book, though every page is interesting, 
and many a one beautiful, as where he pictures the 
fishing fleet going out from St. Ives. The people 
were alien to him. He was annoyed by what he 
considered their childishness or savagery, and " their 
occasional emotional outbreaks, which when produced 
by religious excitement are so painful to witness." 
Unlike the gipsies, they seem not to have been 
interesting to him as a naturalist. In fact, he was 
not at his best with them. Thus, when he wished to 
find " that rarity in Cornwall, a man with a sense of 
humour," he asked a man, who was digging stones 
in a very stony field, where they got stone for building 
houses, and having been told to " use your own eyes," 
and obliged to explain that the question was in fun, 
he related the incident to six people in Cornwall with- 
out amusing them. There were too many Cornishmen 
in Cornwall. What he would have liked would have 
been an odd, isolated one in Kent or Wiltshire. 

On the whole I think Mr. Hudson is most at home 
in Hampshire. True, he has experienced a home 
feeling among the downs, and two of his best books, 
"Nature in Downland" and "A Shepherd's Life," are 
based on observations among the downs of Wiltshire 
and Sussex. But he has been chiefly a rambler in 
those counties. In Hampshire he has apparently been 
at least a migrant with a temporary narrow range. 
Here he may be seen at home with adders, absorbed 
in contemplating or thinking about them. Above all, 
" Hampshire Days " reveals him at home with insects. 
His corner of the New Forest not only abounded in 



W. H. HUDSON 197 

insect life, but there "the kings and nobles of the 
tribe" — the humming-bird hawk-moth, the White 
Admiral butterfly, the fairest and mightiest of the 
dragon-flies, the hornet, the great green grasshopper 
— were to be met with. His intimacy with the insects 
of Hampshire suggests residence. The book would 
have been different had he not spent successive 
summers in the same district. Here, again, there 
is a recollection of South America, where he says of 
the hornet : " As he comes out of the oak-tree shade 
and goes swinging by in his shining gold-red armature, 
he is like a being from some other hotter, richer land, 
thousands of miles away from our cold, white cliffs 
and grey seas." This book is full, like the others, of 
a profound love ; but it is, I think, the happiest of 
them, partly because he was fortunate in the houses 
that received him. One old house, in the south of the 
New Forest, had more of Nature in and about it than 
any other human habitation " in a land whose people 
are discovered dwelling in so many secret, green, out- 
of-the-world places." Another was a cottage on the 
Itchen, between Winchester and Alresford, which he 
had to himself, without dog, cat, child, or chick — only 
the wild birds for company. 

Hampshire, then, is Mr. Hudson's " country." I 
could add many codicils, but I shall be content with 
one, from " Birds and Man," from the chapter on 
" Daws in the West Country," where he says : 

*' Of all the old towns which the bird loves and 
inhabits in numbers, Wells comes first. If Wells had 
no birds, it would still be a city one could not but 
delight in. There are not more than half a dozen 



198 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

towns in all the country where (if I were compelled 
to live in towns) life would not seem something oi 
a burden ; and of these two are in Somerset — Bath 
and Wells. . . . Wells has the first place in my affec- 
tions, and is the one town in England the sight of which 
in April and early May, from a neighbouring hill, has 
caused me to sigh with pleasure." 

Scattered over his rambling books are passages that 
give an intense, and even magical, but quite unfanciful, 
life to many of the towns and villages, as well as the 
rivers, woods, and hills, of England. They have the 
beauty of discoveries and the sufficingness of what is 
genuinely imagined. But whether he is a rambler or 
a sojourner, it is seldom as a traveller that he interests 
us. He lays little stress on his walking or cycling. 
They are means to an end, and his end is to be still, 
somewhere in the sun or under trees where birds are. 

Primarily his search has been for birds. When, for 
example, he found himself at Chepstow, and was dis- 
appointed in his hope of seeing a rare species near by, 
he tells us that he had " to extract what pleasure he 
could " out of the castle, the Wye, and Tintern Abbey. 
These things had already been discovered, and he 
knew it. He does not positively refuse to like what 
others are well known to have liked ; for example, he 
likes a vast range of English poets from Swinburne to 
Bloomfield ; but he must always be discovering. ' He 
discovered Swinburne by his own side-track, I have 
no doubt. So he discovered the city of Wells, which 
he informs us is the one city in the kingdom where 
you will hear that " woodland sound," the laughter 
of the green woodpecker; and also the city of Bath,^ 



W. H. HUDSON 199 

" a city that has a considerable amount of Nature in its 
composition, and is set down in a country of hills, 
woods, rocks, and streams, and is therefore, like the 
other, a city loved by daws and by many other wild 
birds." He has gone about without dictionaries of 
literature, and practically without maps or guides. 
The scenes which he can best or most happily re- 
member are those discovered by chance, which he had 
not heard of, or else had heard of and forgotten, or 
which he had not expected to see. His books now 
contain, fortunately, an almost countless number of 
these scenes, each one of them peopled, made alive, 
made (I should say) next to immortal, by the presence 
of some extraordinary or beautiful living thing, by a 
child, an adder, a vast ringing and echoing and re- 
echoing of bells, a cowman, a fox, a poet, a river, a 
memory, a legend, above all by birds, together with 
his own personality that withdraws itself, at times, far 
from vulgar error as from poetic illusion, but seldom 
far from profound humanity or natural magic, and, if it 
eludes our sympathy, never our wonder, curiosity, and 
admiration. 



THE EAST COAST AND MIDLANDS 

COWPER FITZGERALD 

CRABBE BORROW 

CLARE TENNYSON 

SWINBURNE 



COWPER 

COWPER'S country is easily mapped. That 
small circle of field and woodland, with Olney 
at its centre, the Ouse its diameter, Yardley Chase at 
the circumference, is Cowper's country and nothing 
else. What it was during the last third of the 
eighteenth century is made so clear by his poems and 
letters that it has a slight unreality to-day. Two 
volumes on it, " The Rural Walks of Cowper " and 
" Cowper Illustrated by a Series of Views," are 
already old. " The Town of Olney," by Mr. Thomas 
Wright of Olney, is new. With their aid anyone 
can see most of the things that Cowper saw, except 
those that disappeared in his own time, such as the 
poplars at Lavendon, and were lamented by him. 

Perhaps he might have adapted himself to a differ- 
ent country, and have so pervaded it that he would 
have been linked with it inseparably, as he is with 
Olney. But if a place had to be found for him, it 
would be hard to better Olney in Buckinghamshire. 
He was born in the next county, Hertfordshire, at 
Great Berkhamstead Rectory, in 1731. He spent his 
boyhood and youth at Westminster School and the 
Temple. Then in 1763, when he was about to take up 
a clerkship in the House of Lords, he had to be 
removed to a private asylum. Thus he escaped 

203 



204 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

London, where it is possible, however, to imagine 
him spending his life, although the House of Lords 
differs from Olney in several respects. After his re- 
covery he lived at Huntingdon, for most of the time 
in the house of the Mrs. Unwin who was for ever after 
to be his housemate. Her husband died there in 1767, 
and in the same year she and Cowper took the house 
at Olney. There they lived twenty years. Part ot 
the time Lady Austen was near them. He loved her 
well enough to disturb her, but not to be dis- 
turbed. She imposed and inspired " The Task." 
Lady Hesketh, with whom the poet could not be 
unhappy, succeeded her. Cowper's garden communi- 
cated with the Vicarage garden, and he established 
her as vicar. When Cowper and Mrs. Unwin moved, 
it was at her suggestion, and then only to Weston 
Lodge, where they would be close to their friends the 
Throckmortons of Weston. The end began at Weston 
in 1794, with another return of insanity. They went 
the year after to Cowper's cousin, John Johnson, in 
Norfolk, where she died in 1796, he in 1800. Both 
were buried at East Dereham, as Lavengro knew and 
all the world through him. 

Cowper had been happy in the country before he 
came to Olney. He used to stay at Southampton. 
He walked in the neighbourhood of Lymington. He 
bathed at Weymouth. Above all, he walked with his 
cousin. Lady Hesketh, when she was still Harriet 
Cowper; and he particularly remembered walking 
to Netley Abbey, and scrambling over hedges in 
every direction. Years later, when he was past 
fifty, she reminded him of some incident connected 



-,^J- 




COWPERS HOUSE AT OLNEY 

FROM AN ENGRAVING BY GOODAI.L AFTER A DRAWING BY \V. HARVEY 



COWPER 205 

with the fragrance on a certain common near 
Southampton. 

" My nostrils," he wrote from Olney on December 6, 
1785, "have hardly been regaled with those wild 
odours from that day to the present. We have no such 
here. If there ever were any such in this county, 
the enclosures have long since destroyed them ; but 
we have a scent in the fields about Olney that to me 
is equally agreeable, and which, even after attentive 
examination, I have never been able to account for. 
It proceeds, so far as I can find, neither from herb, nor 
tree, nor shrub : I should suppose, therefore, it is from 
the soil. It is exactly the scent of amber when it has 
been rubbed hard, only more potent. I have never 
observed it except in hot weather, or in places where 
the sun shines powerfully, and from which the air is 
excluded. . . ." 

There were, then, no wild heaths near Olney. It 
was low, cultivated land, and he walked about in it 
often, on fine days, with Mrs. Unwin upon his arm, 
and very conscious of mud. Once upon a time, when 
he was twenty, he had been some sort of a sportsman. 
But even then he could steal time, while out shooting, 
to sit under a hedge and write verses " with my pencil 
in hand and my gun by my side." Now the country 
had become a comfortable secluded garden to him 
where he could think and write : as he said, 

" Me poetry (or, rather, notes that aim 
Feebly and faintly at poetic fame) 
Employs, shut out from more important views, 
Fast by the banks of the slow-winding Ouse." 

He hked the country because it was quiet and be- 
cause "God made" it. He liked it also for itself. He 



2o6 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

tells us that he enjoyed the sound of mighty winds in 
woods, and not only the voices of the singing birds, 

" But cawing rooks, and kites that swim sublime 
In still-repeated circles, screaming loud, 
The jay, the pie, and even the boding owl 
That hails the rising moon, have charms for me." 

The country, in fact, gave him half his life. Perhaps 
it was the lesser half. More likely it was not dis- 
tinguished from the rest. For just as he approved 
La Bruyere in the passage, 

" I praise the Frenchman, his remark was shrewd — 
* How sweet, how passing sweet is solitude ! 
But grant me still a friend in my retreat, 
Whom I may whisper, Solitude is sweet,' " 

so he brought out with him something of indoors. 
He enjoyed a picnic. A moss- or root-house in a 
spinney, for conversation or meditation, delighted him. 
Telling us how he set forth alone, 

" When winter soaks the fields, and female feet. 
Too weak to struggle with tenacious clay 
Or ford the rivulets, are best at home," 

he gives us a considerable sense of discomfort, only 
increased by his longing for the pretty thatched cottage 
by the way, which he named the "Peasants' Nest." 
Moreover, the end of his musing on the cottage is — 

" So farewell envy of the ' Peasants' Nest.' 
If solitude make scant the means of life, 
Society for me ! Then seeming sweet. 
Be still a pleasing object in my view. 
My visit still, but never mine abode." 

He grew to like places as people like chairs. They 
pleased and gave no offence, and they became his own. 
The poplars were felled, and he himself suffered : 



COWPER 207 

" Tis a sight to engage me, if anything can, 
To muse on the perishing pleasures of man ; 
Though his Ufe be a dream, his enjoyments, I sec. 
Have a being less durable even than he." 

The letter of May Day, 1786, to Lady Hesketh, where 
he refers to the loss of the trees, tells us almost all 
that we can know about his country pleasures : 

" Our walks are, as I told you, beautiful ; but it 
is a walk to get at them ; and though, when you come, 
I shall take you into* training, as the jockeys say, 
and I doubt not that I shall make a nimble and good 
walker of you in a short time, you would find, as even 
I do in warm weather, that the preparatory steps are 
rather too many in number. Weston, which is our 
pleasantest retreat of all, is a mile off, and there is not 
in that whole mile to be found so much shade as would 
cover you. Mrs. Unwin and 1 have for many years 
walked thither every day in the year, when the weather 
would permit ; and to speak like a poet, the limes and 
the elms of Weston can witness for us both how often 
we have sighed and said, * Oh ! that our garden opened 
into this grove, or into this wilderness ! for we are 
fatigued before we reach them, and when we have 
reached them, have not time enough to enjoy them.' 
Thus stands the case, my dear, and the unavoidable 
ergo stares you in the face. Would / could do so too 
just at this moment ! We have three or four other walks, 
which are all pleasant in their way ; but, except one, 
they all lie at such a distance as you would find 
heinously incommodious. But Weston, as I said 
before, is our favourite : of that we are never weary ; 
its superior beauties gained it our preference at the 
first, and for many years it has prevailed to win 
us away from all the others. There was, indeed, some 
time since, in a neighbouring parish called Lavendon, 



2o8 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

a field, one side of which formed a terrace, and the 
other was planted with poplars, at whose foot ran the 
Ouse, that I used to account a little paradise : but the 
poplars have been felled, and the scene has suffered 
so much by the loss, that though still in point of 
prospect beautiful, it has not charms sufficient to 
attract me now." 

Here, no doubt, there is some eighteenth-century 
understatement, but the fact remains that Cowper was 
an epicurean in the matter of the country, as he was 
with fish and books. Even the Yardley Oak, now 
called Cowper's Oak, that made him say, 

"It seems idolatry with some excuse 
When our forefather Druids in their oaks 
Imagined sanctity,"| 

was to him "one of the wonders that I show to all 
who come this way." It may be, simply, that he seldom 
dared to give free play to his solitary thoughts ; that 
his social chit-chat was to drown great silences. But 
on the whole the lines most characteristic of him 

are — 

" How various his employments whom the world 
Calls idle, and who justly in return 
Esteems that busy world an idler too ! 
Friends, books, a garden, and perhaps his pen, 
Delightful industry enjoyed at home. 
And Nature, in her cultivated trim 
Dressed to his taste, inviting him abroad — 
Can he want occupation who has these ?" 

He went even farther, pronouncing, 

" Who loves a garden loves a greenhouse too." 

His own greenhouse, converted into a summer parlour 
by an awning of mats, afforded him *' by far the 



COWPER 209 

pleasantest retreat in Olney." In fact, he had a 
very kindly feeling for the works of man, however 
much he feared and admired God. From that green- 
house, in summer, he wrote many of his Olney letters. 
Even in a bad June, like that of 1783, it wanted only 
tobacco to perfect it. Or so he told smoke-inhaling 
Bull, the independent minister at Newport Pagnell : 

" My greenhouse, fronted with myrtles, and where 
1 hear nothing but the pattering of a fine shower and 
the sound of distant thunder, wants only the fumes of 
your pipe to make it perfectly delightful. Tobacco 
was not known in the golden age. So much the 
worse for the golden age. This age of iron, or lead, 
would be insupportable without it ; and therefore we 
may reasonably suppose that the happiness of those 
better days would have been much improved by the 
use of it. . . ." 

His poetry tastes as much of the garden as of the 
grove, and as much of the greenhouse. He was most 
at his ease, in fact, when he sat indoors at an open 
window on a fine morning. Take, for example, his 
letter to Lady Hesketh of September, 1788. He was 
then at Weston Lodge : 



^fc.* 



" My dearest Coz, — Beau seems to have objections 
against my writing to you this morning that are not 
to be overruled. He will be in my lap, licking my 
face, and nibbling the end of my pen. Perhaps he 
means to say, I beg you will give my love to her, 
which I therefore send accordingly. There cannot 
be, this hindrance excepted, a situation more favour- 
able to the business I have in hand than mine at this 
moment. Here is no noise, save (as the poets always 
14 



2IO A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

express it) that of the birds hopping on their perches 
and playing with their wires, while the sun glimmer- 
ing through the elm opposite the window falls on my 
desk with all the softness of moonshine. There is not 
a cloud in the sky, nor a leaf that moves, so that, over 
and above the enjoyment of the purest calm, I feel a 
well-warranted expectation that such as the day is, it 
will be to its end. This is the month in which such 
weather is to be expected, and which is therefore 
welcome to me beyond all others, October excepted, 
which promises to bring you hither. At your coming 
you will probably find us, and us only, or, to speak 
more properly, uzz. . . ." 

That being perfect Cowper, it is not easy to imagine 
the poet finding it agreeable to walk " to Dinglederry 
and over the hill into Holbrook Valley" while it 
hailed and blew a hurricane, even though his com- 
panion was a good one who loved a high wind — "so 
at least he assured me, and if he does but like hail- 
stones as well, he must have supposed himself in 
Paradise," If the walk had a merit, perhaps it was 
to magnify the charm of home-coming. After such a 
one, perhaps, he wrote : 

" Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, 
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, 
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn 
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups, 
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, 
So let us welcome peaceful evening in. . . ." 

With him it is always peaceful evening. At least 
the sun has always " the softness of moonshine." 
Everything is tempered. During the French Revolu- 
tion he was, he said, " much better qualified to write 



COWPER 211 

an essay on the Siege of Troy." It is news for him to 
relate that there was a lion at the fair *' seventy years 
of age, and as tame as a goose," who licked his 
keeper's face, and received his head into his mouth 
and let it out unhurt. He glazes his own windows ; 
he kills a troublesome tooth with oil of thyme. Eight 
pair of tame pigeons feed on his gravel walk. . . . 
But he has no idea that a hundred and thirty years 
after his letters will make even that silent age seem 
golden. 



GEORGE CRABBE 

IF a man spends his first twenty years in and about 
his birthplace, that is his country. Crabbe was 
born (in 1754) at Aldeburgh, on the coast of Suffolk. 
He went to school, served his apprenticeship, courted 
his wife, in the same county. As doctor, and after- 
wards as curate, he also lived several years of early 
manhood at Aldeburgh. Outside Suffolk he had 
various residences from time to time, but that was 
his country. 

His father, and his father's father before, was the 
collector of salt duties at Aldeburgh, and part- 
owner of a fishing-boat. The other five sons took to 
the life of Slaughden Quay and the North Sea, but 
George, the eldest, like Richard Jefferies, had no taste 
for the occupations of his family, and he was treated 
with alternating scorn and respect for his bookishness. 
Nothing, however, was spared him. The family was 
poor, the house small, the company of one sort only. 
** He was cradled among the rough sons of the ocean, 
a daily witness of unbridled passions, and of manners 
remote from the sameness and artificial smoothness 
of polished society. . . . Nor, although the family in 
which he was born happened to be somewhat above 
the mass in point of situation, was the remove so 
great as to be marked with any considerable differ- 

212 



GEORGE CRABBE 213 

ence in point of refinement. Masculine and robust 
frames, rude manners, stormy passions, laborious 
days, and occasionally boisterous nights of merriment 
— among such accompaniments was born and reared 
the ' Poet of the Poor.' " It is a low coast of marsh 
and heath. If it had not created Crabbe, Crabbe 
might have created that coast. The sea was eating 
into the town ; it has never eaten up Crabbe's birth- 
place. The same hulks were to be seen *' sticking 
sidelong in the mud " throughout a long lifetime. It 
was a bad place if you were unable to get away 
from it. 

Crabbe missed none of the life, though he could not 
share it. He says, or, to be literal, Richard says, in 
" The Adventures of Richard " : 

" No ships were wreck'd upon that fatal beach, 
But I could give the luckless tale of each ; 
Eager I look'd, till I beheld a face 
Of one disposed to paint their dismal case, 
Who gave the sad survivors' doleful tale 
From the first brushing of the mighty gale 
Until they struck ; and, suffering in their fate, 
I long'd the more they should its horrors state 
While some, the fond of pity, would enjoy 
The earnest sorrows of the feeling boy. 

I sought the men return'd from regions cold , 
The frozen straits, where icy mountains roU'd ; 
Some I could win to tell me serious tales 
Of boats uplifted by enormous whales. 
Or, when harpoon'd, how swiftly through the sea 
The wounded monsters with the cordage flee. 
Yet some uneasy thoughts assail'd me then : 
The monsters warr'd not with, nor wounded, men. 
The smaller fry we take, with scales and fins. 
Who gasp and die — this adds not to our sins ; 
But so much blood, warm life, and frames so large 
To strike, to nmrder, seem'd an heavy charge. . . . 



214 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

There were fond girls who took me to their side 

To tell the storj^ how their lovers died ; 

They praised my tender heart, and bade me prove 

Both kind and constant when I came to love. 

In fact I lived for many an idle year 

In fond pursuit of agitations dear ; 

For ever seeking, ever pleased to find, 

The food I loved, I thought not of its kind ; 

It gave affliction while it brought delight. 

And joy and anguish could at once excite." 

What would such a boy have grown to had he lived 

as delicately as Shelley? If he became "Nature's 

sternest painter," Nature first made him stern. Of 

his mother we know little. Richard in the poem 

says : 

" With pain my mother would my tales receive, 
And say, ' My Richard, do not learn to grieve.' " 

It might be conjectured that his mother was on his 

side : 

" Sure of my mother's kindness, and the joy 
She felt in meeting her rebellious boy, 
I at my pleasure our new seat forsook, 
And, undirected, these excursions took : 
I often rambled to the noisy quay, 
Strange sounds to hear, and business strange to me ; 
Seamen and carmen, and I knew not who — 
A lewd, amphibious, rude, contentious crew — 
Confused as bees appear about their hive, 
Yet all alert to keep their work alive. 
Here, unobserved as weed upon the wave, 
M}'^ whole attention to the scene I gave ; 
I saw their tasks, their toil, their care, their skill. . . ." 

And then, on the other hand, he entered the solitudes 
where later on he botanized ; 

" I loved to walk whei-e none had walk'd before, 
Above the rocks that ran along the shore ; 
Or far beyond the sight of men to stray, 
And take my pleasure when I lost my way ; 



GEORGE CRABBE 215 

For then 'twas mine to trace the hilly heath, 
And all the mossy moor that lies beneath : 
Here had I favourite stations, where I stood 
And heard the murmurs of the ocean-flood, 
With not a sound beside, except when flew 
Aloft the lapwing or the grey curlew, 
Who with wild notes my fancied power defied, 
And mock'd the dreams of solitary pride. 

I loved to stop at every creek and bay 
Made by the river in its winding way, 
And call to memory — not by marks they bare. 
But by the thoughts that were created there. 

Pleasant it was to view the sea-gulls strive 
Against the storm, or in the ocean dive 
With eager scream, or when they dropping gave 
Their closing wings to sail upon the wave : 
Then, as the winds and waters raged around, 
And breaking billows mix'd their deafening sound, 
They on the rolling deep securely hung, 
And calmly rode the restless waves among. 
Nor pleased it less around me to behold, 
Far up the beach, the yest)' sea-foam roll'd ; 
Or, from the shore upborne, to see on high 
The frothy flakes in wild confusion fly ; 
While the salt spray that clashing billows form, 
Gave to the taste a feeling of the storm. . . . 
When I no more my fancy could employ, 
I left in haste what I could not enjoy, 
And was my gentle mother^s welcome boy." 

If Crabbe was this boy, and if he was able to return 
just when he chose to a gentle mother's welcome 
home from 

" Where the Cross-Keys and Plumbers'-Arms invite 
Laborious men to taste their coarse delight," 

it is small wonder that he wrote dismal poetry and 
resorted to opium. 

For a time he boarded at schools in Bungay and 
Stowmarket. Then at fourteen, after an interval of 



2i6 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

work in his father's office, he went to work and learn 
with a surgeon near Bury St. Edmunds, and later on 
with another at Woodbridge. He stopped there until 
he was twenty — that is to say, for four years. At Great 
Parham, a village about ten miles away, he began 
courting the girl whom he was to marry when he was 
nearly thirty. But from Woodbridge he had to re- 
turn to Aldeburgh, again to help his father and to 
"cure the boy Howard of the itch," and perform such 
other professional feats as he could. His skill not 
being great, he went to London to improve it. When 
he came back to Aldeburgh after a year's absence, he 
did not show he had succeeded. First as a surgeon's 
assistant, then independently, he earned with difficulty 
a poor living from the poorest of the neighbourhood. 
Thus he would have had an excess of leisure had he 
not botanized and written verses. The botany turned 
out to be good for his poetry, but bad for his medical 
practice, since his patients expected him to give almost 
for nothing the herbs which he never paid for in lanes, 
heaths, and gardens. He was thus fitting himself to 

write : 

" This green-fringed cup-moss has a scarlet tip, 
That yields to nothing but my Laura's lip." 

But he was not bringing marriage nearer. In 1779, 
therefore, he suddenly went to London to venture all. 
Not until some days after he had pawned his watch 
and his instruments did he begin that progress under 
the hands of patrons, and Burke above all, which led 
to his ordination at the end of 1781 to the curacy of 
Aldeburgh, They did not like him at Aldeburgh. If 
he made any attempt, he soon gave it up — to live 



GEORGE CRABBE 217 

down the dislike of his amphibious fellow-townsmen. 
He was appointed chaplain to the Duke of Rutland at 
Belvoir Castle. His "Village" appeared in 1783, and 
succeeded. He married Miss Elmy, of Great Parham, 
and the couple settled ultimately at Stathern in 
Leicestershire, where he held a curacy. They had 
the woods of Belvoir to ramble in, and Crabbe could 
botanize and write verses. Five years later, in 1789, 
they moved, but only to Muston in Leicestershire, 
Crabbe having been presented to the living. 

But the beauty oi the Lincolnshire border of 
Leicestershire was not as the beauty of Aldeburgh. 
One day Crabbe rode sixty miles to the coast in order 
to dip in the sea " that washed the beach of Alde- 
burgh " ; and it is not surprising that, when his wife's 
father died, and it became possible to dwell in the 
house at Great Parham, they should elect to do so. 
In this neighbourhood he held the curacies of Sweffling 
and Great Glemham, and occupied, after four years at 
Parham, Great Glemham Hall, and finally a house at 
Rendham. All three houses were close to the River 
Aide, and but ten miles inland westward from Alde- 
burgh. At Rendham he wrote much of " The Parish 
Register" and began "The Borough." Then again 
he had to leave Suffolk. He held the living at 
Muston, and the Bishop compelled him to reside. 
Here he went on with "The Borough," and wrote 
" The Tales." But the borough was a magnified 
Aldeburgh, and at Aldeburgh, during a long visit, 
he finished it. In "The Tales," written in Leicester- 
shire, and in " Tales of the Hall," written after his 
last move — which was to Trowbridge in 18 14 — Crabbe 



2i8 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

returned to Suffolk from time to time. Thus, the road 
followed by Orlando in " The Lovers' Journey " is said 
to be that often followed by Crabbe in walking from 
Aldeburgh to Beccles, when his sweetheart lived there. 
The port where Richard watched seamen and seabirds 
in " The Adventures of Richard " is Aldeburgh also. 

That coast of his boyhood was, in fact, the only 
scenery which he could picture as large as life. When 
he drew upon the inland country of Glemham or 
Belvoir or Trowbridge, he painted fields or houses 
among trees gently enough, but they were not Alde- 
burgh, and they were not Crabbe, or, rather, they 
were that gentle boy revisiting the earth in happier 
circumstances. Then Crabbe showed that the feminine 
elements of beauty had not escaped him, or he could 
not have written in "The Hall": 

"He chose his native village, and the hill 
He clirab'd a boy had its attraction still ; 
With that small brook beneath, where he would stand, 
And stooping fill the hollow of his hand, 
To quench th' impatient thirst — then stop awhile 
To see the sun upon the waters smile, 
In that sweet weariness when, long denied, 
We drink and view the fountain that supplied 
The sparkling bliss — and feel, if not express. 
Our perfect ease in that sweet weariness." 

The atmosphere of reminiscence overcomes Crabbe, 
and puts him into this mood again a little later, in a 
passage with a sonnet effect : 

" It was a fair and mild autumnal sky, 
And earth's ripe treasures met th' admiring eye, 
As a rich beauty, when her bloom is lost, 
Appears with more magnificence and cost. 
The wet and heavy grass, where feet had stray' d, 
Not yet erect, the wanderer's way betray'd ; 



GEORGE CRABBE 219 

Showers of the night had swell'd the deep'ning rill ; 
The morning breeze had urged the quick'ning mill ; 
Assembled rooks had wing'd their seaward flight, 
By the same passage to return at night ; 
While proudly o'er them hung the steady kite, 
Then turn'd him back, and left the noisy throng, 
Nor deign'd to know them as he sail'd along. 
Long yellow leaves from oziers, strew'd around, 
Choked the small stream, and hush'd the feeble sound ; 
While the dead foliage dropt from loftier trees. 
Our squire beheld not with his wonted ease, 
But to his own reflections made reply. 
And said aloud, ' Yes ! doubtless we must die.' " 

The windmill, the rookery, the small stream, the 
neighbourhood of the sea, suggest the Upper Aide, 
perhaps at Rendham. By the time this was written 
Crabbe had seen much of Southern England, and it 
might be thought that *' The Ancient Mansion " would 
taste, say, of Wiltshire ; but then comes in upon that 
beautiful autumnal beauty "the distant sea's uncer- 
tain sound," as well as 

" Here and there a gun, whose loud report 
Proclaims to man that Death is but his sport." 

Nevertheless, it is certain that the more he lived 
inland and in comfortable circumstances the more he 
saw calm beauty in the country, and the less did he 
dwell upon mud and muddy water and people to match, 
like that " one poor dredger " in " The Borough," 

" He, cold and wet, and driving with the tide. 
Beats his weak arms against his tarry side, 
Then drains the remnant of diluted gin 
To aid the warmth that languishes within, 
Renewing oft his poor attempts to beat 
His tingling fingers into gathering heat." 

He gave freer and freer play to the comparatively mys- 
terious quality which saw beauty in the "windows dim " 



220 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

of the ancient mansion, a quality that emerged in the 
earlier poems only occasionally, in a passage like this : 

" The ocean, too, has winter views serene, 
When all you see through densest fog is seen ; 
When you can hear the fishers near at hand 
Distinctly speak, yet see not where they stand ; 
Or sometimes them and not their boat discern, 
Of half conceal'd some figure at the stern ; 
The view's all bounded, and from side to side 
Your utmost prospect but a few ells wide ; 
Boys who, on shore, to sea the pebble cast, 
Will hear it strike against the viewless mast ; 
While the stern boatman growls his fierce disdain, 
At whom he knows not, whom he threats in vain. 

'Tis pleasant then to view the nets float past. 
Net after net till all beyond you slip ; 
A boat comes gliding from an anchor'd ship, 
Breaking the silence with the dipping oar 
And their own tones, as labouring for the shore — 
Those measured tones which with the scene agree, 
And give a sadness to serenity." 

This is Crabbe alone, leaning on Nature, and not 

frowning the frown of the just upon the imperfect 

world of men. Yet how resolute is its avoidance ot 

adding to the mystery by artifice ! 

In one of his posthumous poems Crabbe asked his 

Muse if she could " ken the science of the fist " — it 

seems that she could not — and addressed her as 

" Muse of my service and mistress of my time, 
Who leav'st the gay, the grand, and the sublime — 
Those who without an atmosphere are known. 
And paintest creatures just as they are shown." 

And altogether he expressed himself a good many 
times to the same effect, though without assuming 
that " atmosphere " is an inessential more or less 
deliberately superadded. When asked about the origin 
of the characters in his poems, he answered : ** There 



GEORGE CRABBE 221 

is not one of whom I had not in my mind the original, 
but I was obliged in most cases to take them from 
their real situations, and, in one or two instances, even 
to change their sex, and in many the circumstances." 
He did not know that he could paint " merely from his 
own fancy "; why should he ? " Is there not diversity 
enough in society ?" He was, of course, conscious of 
being a pioneer. He was writing of common life with- 
out intending to amuse. It was his fear that 

" Cities and towns, the various haunts of men, 
Require the pencil ; they defy the pen. 
Could he, who sang so well the Grecian fleet, 
So well have sung of alley, lane, or street ? . . . 
Can I the seats of wealth and want explore. 
And lengthen out my lays from door to door ?" 

So far as he meant mere description his fear was just, 

because, 

" Of sea or river, of a quay or street, 
The best description must be incomplete." 

But he exaggerated a little ludicrously the impotence 
of art even at a more suitable task than description, 
when he assumed that the painter was setting up his 
paints in competition with the hues of Time and 
Nature. He pointed to an old tower, and exclaimed : 

" And wouldst thou, artist, with thy tints and brush, 
Form shades hke these ? Pretender, where thy blush ? 
In three short hours shall thy presuming hand 
Th' effect of three slow centuries command ? 
Thou mayst thy various greens and greys contrive : 
They are not lichens, nor like aught alive. 
But yet proceed, and when thy tints are lost. 
Fled in the shower, or crumbled by the frost ; 
When all thy work is done away as clean 
As if thou never spread'st thy grey and green : 
Then mayst thou see how Nature's work is done, 
How slowly true she lays her colours on ; 



222 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

When her least speck upon the hardest flint 
Has mark and form, and is a living tint, 
And so embodied with the rock that few 
Can the small germ upon the substance view." 

Being a botanist, and an Aldeburgh man to boot, 
who had handled butter-tubs on Slaughden Quay, he 
was a little contemptuous of lily-fingered artists. At 
the time he was probably despairing of ever finding an 
artist who should see that " all that grows has grace," 
and should love even the "grave flora" of the marsh- 
land, which " scarcely deigns to bloom." In a note he 
added further particulars about the flora of fen and 
dike, concluding with these words : " Such is the 
vegetation of the fen when it is at a small distance 
from the ocean ; and in this case there arise from it 
effluvia strong and peculiar, half saline, half putrid, 
which would be considered by miost people as offensive, 
and by some as dangerous; but there are others to whom 
singularity of taste or association of ideas has rendered 
it agreeable and pleasant." There is no doubt as to 
whether he ranks himself with "most people" or 
" others." If it were a taste that could be acquired 
easily Crabbe would be better liked, and it would be 
more commonly admitted that the dreadful and deeply- 
rutted track torn by his sternly-moulded prose in 
couplets did lead to Parnassus. 

His practice was always asserting that 

" Various as beauteous, Nature, is thy face ; 

all that grows has grace ; 

All are appropriate — bog, and marsh, and fen, 
Are only poor to undiscerning men." 

He was constantly anxious 

" Man as he is to place in all men's view. 
Yet none with rancour, none with scorn pursue." 



GEORGE CRABBE 223 

Just as he gave plants their proper names, instead of 
alluding to them poetically, so he described men and 
women as, in his opinion, they really were. As a 
matter of fact, he was very far from being impersonal. 
The man who liked that half-saline, half-putrid fen 
stink is a very powerful presence in his poems. The 
drab, monotonous verse is at times so dismal in effect 
as to approach a sort of sublimity, and, unfantastic 
though it is, it has a nightmare effect. This drab, 
monotonous verse, onl}^ not drab when it is fierce or 
rarelier soft, is a large part of Crabbe's personality, 
and destroys his intention of photographing Aldeburgh, 
Rendham, Muston, Trowbridge. If anything, he pre- 
dominates too much. He is large-hearted, he is just, 
but never dramatic. He pities ; perhaps he sympa- 
thizes ; he wishes to understand ; but he treats his 
characters like a schoolmaster or clergyman. In the 
*' Parish Register " we hear him, when he is asked to 
baptize a child in a fantastic name : 

" ' Why Lonicera wilt thou name thy child ?' 
I asked the gardener's wife in accents mild ;" 

and report said that he turned away a too youthful 
couple from the altar once with accents perhaps not 
quite so mild. Now mild, now stern, he is ever thus. 
What is miserable is so because that is his opinion of 
it ; what is good is so because he approves. He is the 
censor of mankind. He weighs them in the balance, 
and seems even to award their punishment — what 
punishment could be greater than a dozen of his grey 
Rhadamanthine couplets ? Well, iiirthe end, perhaps, 
he had the laugh of Aldeburgh, and did just as well to 
keep clear of it. 



JOHN CLARE 

THERE is no mistaking Clare's country. He was 
born at Helpston in Northamptonshire, which 
lies between Stamford and Peterborough, just outside 
the edge of Deeping Fen, on a Roman road and the 
Great Northern Railway, At seventy-one he was 
buried there. When he was nearly forty a patron 
gave him a new cottage three miles away towards the 
Fen, at Northborough, but he moved unwillingly. 
Once or twice he visited London. The last thirty 
years of his life he spent in Northampton Asylum; but, 
as the poems written there manifest, he was then more 
than ever at Helpston, cheerlessly enjoying over again 
the periods of childhood and of courtship. His biog- 
rapher says that at the end he used to sit in a window 
recess at the asylum looking out over the River Nene 
and Northampton, but that when he was still not 
infirm '* he was allowed to go almost daily ... to sit 
under the portico of All Saints' Church, watching the 
gambols of the children around him, and the fleeting 
clouds high up in the sky." Most of the county and 
more than the borders of its neighbours were known 
to him. He tended sheep and geese on Helpston Heath 
in his seventh year ; and there he found the gipsies, 
under King Boswell, with whom he sought relief from 
a love disappointment. He went to school at Glinton, 

224 



JOHN CLARE 225 

four miles off, at the edge of Peterborough Great Fen. 
To Wisbech he went, b}^ barge from Peterborough, 
when he thought that he was to become a lawyer's clerk. 
At Stamford, having paid a cowherd to take care of his 
horses during the journey thither, he bought Thomson's 
" Seasons," and behind the wall of Burghley Park, on 
the return journey, he devoured the book and began to 
write poetry. Having enlisted at the Blue Bell in his 
native village, he was marched first to Peterborough, 
then to Oundle ; and it was at Oundle that he bought 
the " Paradise Lost '" and " Tempest " which he brought 
back with him on his discharge. He was a lime-burner 
near Bridge Casterton in Rutlandshire. Great Caster- 
ton Church he^was married at, when the Marquis of 
Exeter had provided for him with fifteen guineas a year 
and a dinner in the servants' hall at Burghley. Market 
Deeping was the scene of perhaps his happiest day as 
author. He had gone there hawking his own book. 
The Rector had refused to buy a copy, telling him into 
the bargain that hawking was unbecoming. It rained, 
and the hawker took shelter in the covered yard of an 
inn among horse-dealers. 

"One of them, a jolly-looking man with red hair 
and a red nose, after scanning Clare for a while, 
engaged him in conversation. ' You have got some- 
thing to sell there ; what is it ?' The answer was, 
' Books.' ' Whose books ?' ' My own.' ' Yes, I know 
they are your own, or, at least, I suppose so. But 
what kind of books, and by what author?' 'Poems, 
written by myself The horse-dealer stared. He 
looked fixedly at Clare, who was sitting on a stone, 
utterly dejected and scarcely noticing his interlocutor. 
The latter seemed to feel stirred by sympathy, and in 
15 



226 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

a more respectful tone than before 'exclaimed, ' May I 
ask your name?' 'My name is John Clare,' was the 
reply, pronounced in a faint voice. But the words 
were no sooner uttered when the jolly man with the 
red nose seized Clare by both hands. * Well, I am 
really glad to meet you,' he cried. ' I often heard of 
you, and many a time thought of calling at Helpston, 
but couldn't manage it' Then, shouting at the top of 
his voice to some friends at the farther end of the yard, 
he ejaculated, 'Here's John Clare ! I've got John Clare !' 
The appeal brought a score of horse-jobbers up in a 
moment. They took hold of the poet without ceremony, 
dragged him off his stone, and round the yard into the 
back entrance of the inn. * Brandy hot or cold ?' in- 
quired the eldest of Clare's friends. There was a 
refusal under both heads, coupled with the remark 
that a cup of tea would be acceptable. An order for 
it was given at once, and after a good breakfast, and a 
long conversation with his new acquaintances, Clare 
left the inn, delighted with the reception he had met 
with. He had sold all his books, and received for them 
more than the full price, several of his customers re- 
fusing to take change." 

Fame brought him acquainted with Charles Lamb, 
with authors, lords, publishers, but never with better 
company than this at Market Deeping in 1828. 

Born in 1793, a year later than Shelley, Clare would 
have been lucky to die as young. His father was a 
labourer — the illegitimate child of a roving fiddler- 
schoolmaster and a parish clerk's daughter — a pauper 
in bad health ; and he was a seven-months child, one 
of twins. The home of the Clares was a fourth part 
of an old peasant's house in the High Street of Help- 
ston, " a narrow wretched hut, more like a prison than 



JOHN CLARE 227 

a human dwelling ... in a dark, gloomy plain covered 
with stagnant pools of water, and overhung by mists 
during the greater part of the year." He was goose- 
tending at seven, threshing and following the plough 
before his teens, until weakness and the tertiary 
ague stopped him. Nevertheless, looking backward 
in manhood, he saw no flaw in his childhood or in 
the cottage : 

" The old house stooped just like a cave, 

Thatched o'er with mosses green ; 
Winter around the walls would rave, 

But all was calm within ; 
The trees are here all green again, 

Here bees the flowers still kiss, 
But flowers and trees seemed sweeter then : 

My early home was this." 

No other poet has known such a cottage better or 
has described it as Vv^ell as Clare ; but even he has 
to paint it from the outside chiefly, and best of all 
in " The Cross Roads," where the cottage is not 
ostensibly his own, but one which he peered into 
as a child : 

" The very house she liv'd in, stick and stone, 
Since Goody died, has tumbled down and gone : 
And where the marjoram once, and sage, and rue. 
And balm, and mint, with curl'd-leaf parsley grew, 
And double marygolds, and silver thyme, 
And pumpkins 'neath the window us'd to cHrab ; 
And where I often when a child for hours 
Tried through the pales to get the tempting flowers, 
As lady's laces, everlasting peas. 
True-love-lies-bleeding, with the hearts-at-ease. 
And golden rods, and tansy running high. 
That o'er the pale-tops smil'd on passers-by, 
Flowers in my time that everyone would praise, 
Tho' thrown like weeds from gardens nowadays ; 



228 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

Where all these grew, now henbane stinks and spreads, 
And docks and thistles shake their seedy heads. 
And yearly keep with nettles smothering o'er ; — 
The house, the dame, the garden known no more : 
While, neighbouring nigh, one lonely elder-tree 
Is all that's left of what had us'd to be. 
Marking the place, and bringing up with tears 
The recollections of one's younger years. ..." 

That elder-tree occurs with exact reality. It was a 
cottage like this that came into Clare's mind when he 
read a letter containing proposals for building a cottage, 
and he made a poem of it. 

But though he liked to picture the outside of an old 
labourer's cottage, he was happiest in the fields. He 
had had time for childhood's pleasures. By Swordy 
Well he could both tend the cattle and play at " roly- 
poly" down the hill. He is the best of all poets at 
suggesting the nests and eggs of wild birds, and his 
"November" contains a truthful picture of a boy 
sheltering from a winter storm and 

" Oft spying nests where he spring eggs had ta'en, 
And wishing in his heart 'twas summer-time again." 

The mixture of farm labour and bird's-nesting did not 
content him, after he had loved and lost Mary Joyce 
over at Glinton when he was fifteen. He worked in 
the garden at Burghley Park for a change, and, run- 
ning away, had a spell of truancy. Another interval 
he spent in enlisting, another with gipsies. Marriage 
at the age of twenty-seven, and a rapid succession of 
children that began a month later, might have done 
something towards settling him, but he published his 
first book, " Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and 
Scenery," in the year of his marriage, 1820. 



JOHN CLARE 229 

It is hard to imagine a combination with more pos- 
sibilities for wretchedness than that of poet and agri- 
cultural labourer. I mean a poet of any known breed. 
Of course, it is easy to invent a poet suddenly making 
poetry of all that dignity and beauty in the labourer's 
life which we are so ready to believe in. But such a 
one has not yet appeared. It is doubtful if he ever 
will, or if we ought to complain of the lack, since what 
we want to see in some perhaps impossible peasant 
poetry has always been an element in great poetry. 
If we knew their pedigrees, we should find more 
than one peasant among the ancestors of the poets. 
In fact, every man, poet or not, is a more or less 
harmonious combination of the peasant and the 
adventurer. 

In no man have these two parts been more curiously 
combined than in John Clare, a real poet, however 
small, and actually an agricultural labourer out and 
out. He was far from being the kind of peasant poet 
who would be invented in an armchair. Mortal man 
could hardly be milder, more timid and drifting, than 
Clare. He heard voices from the grave, not of rustic 
wisdom and endurance, but 

" Murmuring o'er one's weary woe, 
Such as once 'twas theirs to know, 
They whisper to such slaves as me 
A buried tale of misery : — 
' We once had life, ere life's decline, 
Flesh, blood, and bones the same as thine ; 
We knew its pains, and shared its grief, 
Till death, long-wish'd-for, brought relief ; 
We had our hopes, and like to thee, 
Hop'd morrow's better day to see. 
But like to thine, our hope the same, 
To-morrow's kindness never came : 



230 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

We had our tyrants, e'en as thou ; 
Our wants met many a scornful brow ; 
But death laid low their wealthy powers, 
Their harmless ashes mix with ours : 
And this vain world, its pride, its form. 
That treads on thee as on a worm, 
Its mighty heirs — the time shall be 
When they as quiet sleep as thee !'" 

He looked back to childhood, asking : 

" When shall I see such rest again ?" 

Contact with the town — 

" In crowded streets flowers never grew, 
But many there hath died away " 

— sharpened his nerves for natural beauty. The poet 
consumed the labourer in him, or left only the dregs 
of one, while the conditions of the labourer's life were 
as a millstone about his neck as poet. As a young man, 
sometimes neither labouring nor poetry could satisfy 
him, and he would escape to two brothers named 
Billings, men given to '* poaching, hard drinking, and 
general rowdyism," whose ruinous cottage at Helpston 
was nicknamed " Bachelors' Hall." His biographer 
says that he was " too deep a lover of all creatures that 
God had made " to become a poacher, but that never- 
theless, for all his ordinary shyness, "he was at these 
meetings the loudest of loud talkers and singers." He 
seems to have taken most of the opportunities of leaving 
his cottage and Helpston, and most opportunities of 
coming back to them. Marriage meant crowding into 
that fourth part of a cottage with parents, wife, and 
children. 



JOHN CLARE 231 

For a short time he was a minor celebrity, meeting 
some of the great men of his day, such as Coleridge 
and Lamb, after the publication of " Poems Descriptive 
of Rural Life and Scenery " in 1820, But he was then 
no more fitted for the literary life than at birth he was 
fitted for the life of the fields. Delicate and passionate, 
he was early broken by under-feeding and over-drink- 
ing, so that he could love only the incidents of the 
country, the birds, the flowers, the young girl like a 

flower : 

" Nor could I pull 
The blossoms that I thought divine 
As hurting beauty like to thine." 
« 
Unlike Burns, he had practically no help from the 
poetry and music of his class. He was a peasant 
writing poetry, yet cannot be called a peasant poet, 
because he had behind him no tradition of peasant 
literature, but had to do what he could with the cur- 
rent forms of polite literature. The mastering of these 
forms absorbed much of his energy, so that for so 
singular a man he added little of his own, and the 
result was only thinly tinged with his personality, 
hardly at all with the general characteristics of his 
class. 

His work is founded chiefly on literary models. Yet 
he lacked the intellect and power of study to live by 
the pen as he lacked the grit to live by hoe and pitch- 
fork. A small income was subscribed for him, but he 
failed to found even a moderately sound productive 
life on it. Never, except in fancy rhyme, had he the 
Plenty which he desired, or the cottage of his verses, 
" After reading in a letter proposals for building a 



232 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

cottage." His only lasting pleasure was in remem- 
bering happier things, with the reflection : 

" Ah ! sweet is all that I'm denied to share ; 
Want's painful hindrance sticks me to her stall." 

He said truly : 

" No, not a friend on earth had I 
But mine own kin and poesy." 

He never became any more docile to the fate of agri- 
cultural labourers than he had been when a young 
man. After walking home for the first time with the 
girl who was to be his wife, and saying good-bye, he 
waited about, watching the lights of her house, for an 
hour or two. He then set out homeward, but lost his 
way in the dark, and sat down contentedly^ when the 
moon rose, to write a love-song. In the morning he 
awoke by the brink of a canal where he had slept, 
exhausted at the end of a long night's wandering. 

But it was in his power to do for his native district 
something like what Jefferies^did for his. He possessed 
a similar fresh, sweet spirituality to that of Jefferies, a 
similar grasp and love of detail. Some of his plain 
descriptions anticipate and at least equal the " Nature 
article " of to-day. His was a pedestrian Muse 

" who sits her down 
Upon the molehill's little lap, 
Who feels no fear to stain her gown, 
And pauses by the hedgerow gap." 

And he often wrote long formless pieces full of place- 
names and of field-lore charmingly expressed, songs 
uttering his love and his pathetic joy in retrospection, 
poems mingling the two elements. A thousand things 
which the ordinary country child, ** tracking wild 



JOHN CLARE 233 

searches through the meadow grass," has to forget in 
order to live, Clare observed and noted — as, for ex- 
ample, how in July's drought 

" E'en the dew is parched up 
From the teasel's jointed cup." 

In putting down some of these things with a lowly 
fidelity, he often achieves a more rustic truth than 
other poets, as in — 

" And rambling bramble-berries, pulpy and sweet, 
Arching their prickly trails 
Half o'er the narrow lane." 

Sometimes he attains almost to magic, as in — 

" For when the world first saw the sun, 

These little flowers beheld him, too ; 
And when his love for earth begun, 

They were the first his smiles to woo. 
There little lambtoe bunches springs 

In red-tinged and begolden dye, 
For ever, and like China kings 

They come, but never seem to die." 

He was something more and less than a peasant be- 
come articulate. For example, he had an unexpected 
love, not only of the wild, but of the waste places, the 
** commons left free in the rude rags of Nature," " the 
old molehills of glad neglected pastures." Though he 
did call the henbane " stinking," he half loved it for 
the places, like Cowper's Green, where he found it, 
with bramble, thistle, nettle, hemlock, 

" And full many a nameless weed, 
Neglected, left to run to seed, 
Seen but with disgust by those 
Who judge a blossom by the nose. 
Wildness is my suiting scene, 
So I seek thee, Cowper Green.' 



234 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

To enumerate the flowers was a pleasure to him, 
and he did so in a manner which ^preserves them still 
dewy, or with summer dust, perhaps, on " an antique 
mullein's flannel-leaves." Can he ever have cultivated 
his garden ? If he did, and then wrote — 

" Hawkweed and groundsel's fanning downs 
Unruffled keep their seeded crowns," 

he must have been a kind of saint ; and, indeed, he had 
such a love for wild things as some saints have had, 
which he shows in the verses : 

" I left the little birds 
And sweet lowing of the herds, 
And couldn't find out words, 

Do you see, 
To say to them good-bye. 
Where the yellowcups do lie ; 
So heaving a deep sigh 
Took to sea." 

When he lamented leaving his old home, he did not 
mention the building itself, but the neighbouring heath, 

"its yellow furze, 
Molehills and rabbit tracks that lead 
Through beesom, ling, and teasel burrs . . ." 

the trees, the lanes, the stiles, the brook, the flowers, 

the shepherd's-purse that grew in the old as well as 

the new garden ; 

" The very crow 
Croaked music in my native fields." 

One of his Asylum Poems, first printed by Mr. 
Arthur Symons, is full of place-names that were music 
to him, and become so to us — " Langley Bush," " East- 
well's boiling spring," "old Lee Close oak," "old 



JOHN CLARE 235 

Crossberry Way," " pleasant Swordy Well " again, 
" Round Oak," " Sneap Green," " Ruddock's Nook," 
" Hilly Snow" — as he mourns : 

" And Crossberry Way and old Round Oak's narrow lane 
With its hollow trees like pulpits I shall never see again. 
Enclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain, 
It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill 
And hung the moles for traitors, though the brook is running 

still 
It runs a naked stream cold and chill," 

But he had the farm life also by heart, and, along 
with blackbird and robin and magpie, drew the dog 
chasing the cat, the cows tossing the molehills in their 
play, the shepherd's dog daunted by the rolled-up 
hedgehog, the maids singing ballads at milking or hang- 
ing out linen around the elder-skirted croft, while 

" The gladden'd swine bolt from the sty. 

And round the yard in freedom run, 
Or stretching in their slumbers lie 

Beside the cottage in the sun. 
The young horse whinneys to his mate, 

And, sickening from the thresher's door. 
Rubs at the straw-yard's banded gate, 

Longing for freedom on the moor." 

No man ever came so near to putting the life of the 
farm, as it is lived, not as it is seen over a five-barred 
gate, into poetry. He gives no broad impressions — he 
saw the kite, but not the kite's landscape — yet his 
details accumulate in the end, so that a loving reader, 
and no one reads him but loves him, can grasp them, 
and see the lowlands of Northamptonshire as they 
were when the kite still soared over them. 



FITZGERALD 

BY birth and almost continuous residence, Edward 
FitzGerald was a complete East Anglian. He 
was born at Bredfield House, near Woodbridge, in 
Suffolk. His school was King Edward the Sixth's at 
Bury St. Edmunds, in the same county ; his Uni- 
versit}'^, Cambridge. When the family moved from 
Bredfield, FitzGerald being then sixteen, it was to 
Wherstead, near Ipswich. From there, ten years 
later, they went to Boulge Hall, near Woodbridge, 
again. The thatched cottage by one of the gates of 
Boulge Hall became FitzGerald's own particular den 
in 1837 when he was twenty-eight. His friend, the 
Rev. George Crabbe, son and biographer of the poet, 
was Vicar of Bredfield, and a close neighbour; Bernard 
Barton lived at Woodbridge ; Archdeacon Groome at 
Monk Soham ; the Rev. John Charlesworth, whose 
daughter FitzGerald admired and E. B. Cowell married, 
at Bramford, near Ipswich ; Mrs. Kerrich, FitzGerald's 
sister, at Geldeston, where the roses blew, he said, " as 
in Persia," and made him regret June's going with an 
Omar-like sorrow ; and James Spedding and Frederick 
Tennyson were among the visitors from farther away. 
FitzGerald wrote " Euphranor " at the cottage, and was 
sufficiently contented with his life there to acquire a 
liking for winter's * decided and reasonable balance of 

236 



FITZGERALD 237 

daylight and candlelight.' At the Hall Farm he spent 
many an evening smoking with the farmer, Job Smith, 
After the farmhouse was burnt down and Job Smith 
took Farlingay Hall, nearer Woodbridge, FitzGerald 
lodged with him off and on for seven years from 1853. 
There, he studied Persian, and translated " Salaman 
and Absal " and part of the " Rubaiyat." There Carlyle 
paid him a visit, read and talked with him, and accom- 
panied him to Framlingham, Dunwich, and Aldeburgh. 
H is next move, in 1 860, was into lodgings at Woodbridge, 
with a gunmaker on Market Hill. He lived thirteen 
years over the shop or in the yacht Scandal. For 
a short time after that he had rooms next door ; then, 
in 1875, made his home at Little Grange, not far from 
Bredfield or Woodbridge. Alfred Tennyson was 
among the visitors at Little Grange, and he pictured 
FitzGerald, in the dedication to " Tiresias," 

" Beneath your sheltering garden-tree, 

And while your doves about you flit, 
And plant on shoulder, hand, and knee, 

Or on your head, their rosy feet, 
As if they knew your diet spares ' 

Whatever moved in that full sheet 
Let down to Peter at his prayers ; 

Who live on milk and meal and grass." 

FitzGerald's excursions from Little Grange were 
chiefly to other East Anglian places, such as Aldeburgh, 
Lowestoft, and Merton. He would sail in the Scandal 
to Lowestoft, and put up at 1 1 or 12, Marine Terrace, 
to be near the fisherman " Posh " Fletcher, whom he 
adored. At Merton he used to stay with the Rector, 
George Crabbe, son of the Rector of Bredfield ; and 
there he died. 



2sS A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

If FitzGerald liked any town, it was Bath, where he 
lodged during April and May in 1854, to be near his 
sister, Mrs. de Soyres. Landor, whom he met there, 
has exceeded his praises of the city only in length. 
He recommended it to Frederick Tennyson if he should 
ever live in England, because it was ** a splendid city 
in a lovely, even a noble, country," and its streets " as 
handsome and gay as London, gayer and handsomer 
because cleaner and in a clearer atmosphere." He 
even talked of living there. But he never did. His 
affection for '• the kind, clean air of the country " was 
part of his personal delicacy and idiosyncrasy. When 
he was staying at 19, Charlotte Street, Rathbone 
Place, in 1844, he tried to persuade Carlyle to leave 
'* the accursed den," " his filthy Chelsea." The radishes 
that he had for his breakfast in London had "a savour 
of earth that brings all the delicious gardens of the 
world back into one's soul, and almost draws tears 
from one's eyes." A cloud over Charlotte Street, as he 
is writing to Bernard Barton, " seems as if it were' 
sailing softly in the April wind to fall in a blessed 
shower upon the lilac buds and thirsty anemones some- 
where in Essex ; or ,who knows ? perhaps at Boulge ;" 
and he fancies his red-armed housekeeper shutting 
the cottage windows at Boulge, and the parrot, Beauty 
Bob, casting a bird's eye out at the shower and 
blessing the useful wet, and the German Ocean dimp- 
ling " with innumerable pin-points " of rain, and por- 
poises sneezing " with unusual pellets of fresh water." 
And when he got back to Boulge all his love of natural 
cleanness came out in a letter to Frederick Tennyson 
about the verdure, and the " white clouds moving over 



FITZGERALD 239 

the new-fledged tops of oak-trees, and acres of grass 
striving with buttercups," and about Constable's effort 
" to paint up to the freshness of earth and sky," and 
about the sublime absurdity of trying *' to paint dew 
with lead." No wonder he was a vegetarian, with his, 
humanly speaking, extreme physical and mental scrupu- 
losity. Tennyson told him : 

" None can say 
That Lenten fare makes Lenten thought, 
Who reads your golden Eastern lay. . . ." 

Yet the clean, sweet verses all but give a religious 
tone to his " Rubaiyat." 

Living most of his life in Suffolk, he naturally heard 
Suffolk slighted, and naturally defended it. For 
example, writing in a tremendous east wind, he recalls 
the frosty starlight, perfectly still, yet moaning, of 
three nights agone : 

" What little wind there was carried to us the 
murmurs of the waves circulating round these coasts 
so far [ten miles] over a flat country. But people 
here think that this sound so heard is not from the 
waves that break, but a kind of prophetic voice from 
the body of the sea itself announcing great gales. 
Sure enough we have got them, however heralded. 
Now, I say that all this shows that we in this Suffolk 
are not so completely given over to prose and turnips 
as some would have us. I have always said that 
being near the sea, and being able to catch a 
glimpse of it from the tops of hills and of houses, 
redeemed Suffolk from dullness ; and, at all events, 
that our turnip -fields, dull in themselves, were 
at least set all round with an undeniably poetic 
element." 



240 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

But even in his day — even in Suffolk — there was a 
new race of squires, who seemed to him to use the 
earth simply as an investment, and robbed it of trees 
and birds, and made the country of his youth hideous. 
Also that county had become in fifty years the ceme- 
tery of his friends. And so, he says, " I get to the 
water: where Friends are not buried nor Pathways 
stopt up." With bottled porter and bread and cheese, 
and a chewing sailor, he sailed round to Aldeburgh 
and Lowestoft in the little boat that went "like a 
violin." When the Scandal was sold, he could still 
sail on the River Deben, " looking at the crops as they 
grow green, yellow, russet, and are finally carried 
away in the red and blue waggons with the sorrel 
horse." In the years when it was too late for sailing 
he still went to the sea. At Dunwich, " that old 
Dunwich," he read Lowell's essays out of doors, where 
the robin was singing and the blackberries were 
ripening by the old walls. He stopped at Aldeburgh 
— he had lodged at one time or another in " half the 
houses " there — and watched the harvest moon go up, 
and the hunter's moon, and wrote his two " plenilunal " 
letters to Mrs. Kemble, and read Froude's " Carlyle," 
wishing he had known as much when Carlyle was 
alive, that he might have loved as well as admired 
the man. Less than a year later he was dead himself, 
and taken to Boulge for a grave. 

Wherever it is possible in his scanty writings, 
FitzGerald paints in something of his surroundings. 
The beauty of many passages in his letters shows what 
a bent and gift he had for description. And yet, better 
than most description is that paragraph in his preface 



FITZGERALD 241 

to " Polonius " where he speaks of Northamptonshire. 
His father, and he himself afterwards, had estates in 
the county at Naseby. Castle Ashby, a house built by 
Inigo Jones, belonging to the Marquis of Northampton, 
is on a tributary of the Nene between Olney and 
Wellingborough, in the south-western quarter of the 
county. FitzGerald was looking at the pictures there 
in 1842. Speaking in " Polonius " of the old fashion of 
putting " monitory truisms " on dials, clocks, and 
fronts of buildings, and after mentioning " Go about 
your business," which is on St. James's Church at 
Bury St. Edmunds, he says : 

"The parapet balustrade round the roof of Castle 
Ashby, in Northamptonshire, is carved into the letters 
' Nisi Dominus custodiat domum, frustra vigilat qui 
custodit eam.' This is not amiss to decipher as you 
come up the long avenue some summer or autumn 
day, and to moralize upon afterwards at the little 
Rose and Crown at Yardley [Cowper's Yardley], if 
such good home-brewed be there as used to be before 
I knew I was to die." 

And then "Euphranor." Some tastes may prefer 
Mr. Rupert Brooke's impassioned verses on "Grant- 
chester," but for the present I think it may be said 
that '* Euphranor " discovers the charm of Cambridge 
and the Cambridge meadows, from a University man's 
point of view, as "Thyrsis" and "The Scholar Gipsy" 
discovers that of Oxford. May sunshine on meadow 
and water ; billiards, bowls, and light ale ; argument 
and jest ; Plato and Chaucer, alternate and mingle and 
contrast in such a manner as no Cambridge man would 
16 



242 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

believe possible anywhere else unless it were — just 
conceivably — at Oxford : 

" All breathing of youth, good-humour, and truth, in the time of 
the jolly spring weather, 
In the jolly spring-time, when the poplar and lime dishevel their 
tresses together." 

The end of the day, when the company — all but the 
horseman Phidippus — return afoot from Chesterton, 
is classic : 

"We walked along the fields by the Church, cross'd 
the Ferry, and mingled with the crowd upon the 
opposite shore ; Townsmen and Gownsmen, with the 
tassell'd Fellow-Commoner sprinkled here and there — 
Reading men and Sporting men. Fellows, and even 
Masters of Colleges, not indifferent to the prowess of 
their respective Crews — all these conversing on all 
sorts of topics, from the slang in BeWs Life to the 
last new German revelation, and moving in ever- 
changing groups down the shore of the river, at whose 
farther bend was a httle knot of Ladies gathered up on 
a green knoll faced and illuminated by the beams of 
the setting sun. Beyond which point was at length 
heard some indistinct shouting, which gradually in- 
creased until 'Theyare off — theyare comingl'suspended 
other conversation among ourselves; and suddenly 
the head of the first boat turn'd the corner ; and then 
another close upon it ; and then a third ; the crews 
pulling with all their might compacted into perfect 
rhythm ; and the crowd on shore turning round to 
follow along with them, waving hats and caps, and 
cheering, ' Bravo, St. John's !' ' Go it. Trinity !' — the 
high crest and blowing forelock of Phidippus's mare, 
and he himself shouting encouragement to his crew, 
conspicuous over all — until, the boats reaching us, 



FITZGERALD 243 

we also were caught up in the returning tide of spec- 
tators, and hurried back towards the goal ; where we 
arrived just in time to see the Ensign of Trinity 
lowered from its pride of place, and the Eagle of 
St. John's soaring there instead. Then, waiting a little 
while to hear how the winner had won, and the loser 
lost, and watching Phidippus engaged in eager con- 
versation with his defeated brethren, 1 took Euphranor 
and Lexilogus under either arm (Lycion having got 
into better company elsewhere), and walk'd home with 
them across the meadow leading to the town, whither 
the dusky troops of Gownsmen with all their confused 
voices seem'd as it were evaporating in the twilight, 
while a Nightingale began to be heard among the 
flowering Chestnuts of Jesus." 

That passage alone is enough to make some men 
stop a moment outside Jesus, and take another look at 
Trinity, and ascertain which is No. 19, King's Parade, 
where FitzGerald lodged as an undergraduate. 



GEORGE BORROW 

BORROW was born at East Dereham in Norfolk. 
His parents were a Cornishman married to a 
Norfolk woman of Huguenot descent, and sometimes 
he boasted of Norfolk, sometimes of Cornwall, and 
once of Borrowdale. Some say he was a Celt, though 
he was much more like his mother than his father, who 
seems to have been a very plain man, honouring God 
and George III., and capable of honouring George IV, 
had he lived long enough. East Dereham was his 
mother's home, but in his earliest years he did not long 
dwell there. He moved with his father's regiment, as 
he has in part recorded in " Lavengro." We know 
through Dr. Knapp that they were stationed at Pett 
and at Hythe in 1806, at Canterbury in 1807. In 1812 
he was attending school at Huddersfield ; in 181 3 and 
1 814 at Edinburgh ; in 181 5 at Clonmel. Parts of the 
years 1809 and 18 10 were spent at Dereham, the latter 
part of 1810 at Norman Cross in Huntingdonshire, and 
wandering by Whittlesea, where he appears to have 
met, not only the old viper-hunter who tells the tale of 
the King of the Vipers, but also Jasper Petulengro, to 
whom he was sworn a brother. He wandered free, 
and while he nearly killed himself with poisonous 
berries, he learnt to handle vipers with love and im- 
punity. He went to school at Dereham in 1811, but 

244 



GEORGE BORROW 245 

in 1 8 14 and 181 5, and again until 1819, to the grammar- 
school at Norwich. The school fostered his inde- 
pendence by attacking it. He and some others pro- 
posed to go and live in caves upon the seashore, but 
got no farther east than Acle before they were detained 
and returned. 

One way and another Borrow consented to spend 
much time in and about Norwich. He was, roughly 
speaking, a Norwich man. The passage leading to his 
father's house in Willow Lane has become Borrow's, 
instead of King's, Court. His friend Thurtell, boxer, 
friend of boxers, murderer, was son of a Mayor of 
Norwich. His sworn brother, Jasper Petulengro, 
reappeared in 1818 at the Tombland Fair in Norwich ; 
and on Household Heath, outside the city, Borrow 
frequently visited the gipsy encampment, and, accord- 
ing to his account, learnt their language. He fished 
in the Yare, where it flows past Earlham Hall. At 
Norwich in 18 19, in Tuck's Court, St. Giles's, he was 
articled clerk to Messrs. Simpson and Rackham, 
solicitors, living with Simpson in the Upper Close. 
His desk now, perhaps, for the first time served the 
purpose of a young man who was learning Welsh, 
Danish, Hebrew, Arabic, Gaehc, and Armenian. 
William Taylor — "Godless Billy Taylor" — of 21, King 
Street, a German scholar, a friend of the French Revo- 
lution and of Southey, and the philosopher and literary 
master of Borrow's teens, was a Norwich man. In the 
Guildhall of Norwich, Borrow read the books, which 
taught him what he knew of Anglo-Saxon, Early 
English, Welsh, and Scandinavian. Here in Norwich 
he began to write his translations of German, Danish, 



246 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

Swedish, and Dutch poetry for the magazines. 
Norwich was on the title-page of his first book, a 
translation of a German " Faustus," in 1825, and of his 
second, the " Romantic Ballads," in 1826. 

His father died in 1824, his articles expired soon 
after, and next day Borrow went up to London. 
London is the second, if not the first, home of most 
writing men, and it was to be Borrow's, but not imme- 
diately. He lodged at 16, Millman Street, Bedford 
Row, compiled a series of ** Celebrated Trials," wrote 
for the magazines, did very much what he was told — 
only he was not told enough — by editors and pub- 
lishers. Thus he was both ill and poor when Jasper 
reappeared, and, according to " Lavengro," offered him 
a loan of ;^5o. Borrow refused, but wrote " The Life 
and Adventures of Joseph Sell " (we have his word for 
it), and with the gains in his pocket got well out of 
London by the coach to Amesbury. Here followed 
those western and midland travels which provided 
some of the foundations of ** Lavengro " and " The 
Romany Rye." Mumper's Dingle may have been 
Mumber Lane, five miles from Willenhall in Stafford- 
shire. Shropshire is Shropshire, and Horncastle is 
Horncastle, but the book is not topography. If he had 
mentioned no names, nobody would have had any 
idea of the route, or have had any ground for begin- 
ning to conjecture. The books, written over twenty 
years later, present us with a memory of inland 
England, refined by dream, modified by romance. 
It would be difficult for one describing a journey to 
give a less realistic account of the country, the roads, 
and the conditions of travel. Only the towns, London, 



GEORGE BORROW 247 

Norwich, Edinburgh, Horncastle, and the other stop- 
ping-places, are more or less clearly drawn, and are 
mentioned by name. The old bee-keeper's garden is 
real enough, but it has no locality. The country which 
Borrow makes most impressive is the Irish bogland. 
Level, misty, uninhabited, it lends itself perfectly to 
the purposes of his mystery : 

" The skies darkened, and a heavy snow-storm came 
on ; the road then lay straight through a bog, and was 
bounded by a deep trench on both sides. I was making 
the best of my way, keeping as nearly as I could in 
the middle of the road, lest, blinded by the snow 
which was frequently borne into my eyes by the wind, 
I might fall into the dyke, when all at once I heard a 
shout to windward, and turning my eyes I saw the 
figure of a man, and what appeared to be an animal of 
some kind, coming across the bog with great speed, in 
the direction of myself; the nature of the ground 
seemed to offer but little impediment to these beings, 
both clearing the holes and abysses which lay in their 
way with surprising agility ; the animal was, however 
some slight way in advance, and, bounding over the 
dyke, appeared on the road just before me. It was a 
dog, of what species I cannot tell, never having seen 
the like before or since ; the head was large and 
round, the ears so tiny as scarcely to be discernible, 
the eyes of a fiery red ; in size it was rather small than 
large ; and the coat, which was remarkably smooth, as 
white as the falling flakes. It placed itself directly in 
my path, and showing its teeth, and bristling its coat, 
appeared determined to prevent my progress. I had 
an ashen stick in my hand, with which I threatened it ; 
this, however, only served to increase its fury ; it 
rushed upon me, and I had the utmost dijfficulty to 
preserve myself from its fangs. 



248 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

" * What are you doing with the dog, the fairy dog ?' 
said a man, who at this time Hkewise cleared the dyke 
at a bound. . . ." 

Now, that is Borrow's country, the country of his 
soul. It may be felt in his Spain, in his Wales, in his 
London, in his Salisbury Plain, but it is essentially an 
imaginative country, the product of his studies and of 
his temperament, with those early memories of Ireland 
as an airy groundwork. Perhaps it is Celtic. His 
principal walking tours in middle and later life were 
in Celtic lands — in Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, 
and the Isle of Man. 

After the experiences which are supposed to have 
been the foundations of " Lavengro " and " The 
Romany Rye," Borrow seems to have lived alter- 
nately in Norwich and in London, doing uncongenial 
work, and too little of that to live by according to his 
liking. London became part of his country, because 
certain regions were afterwards to be associated with 
him, still more because his impressions of it in those 
autobiographical books have the same perfectly indi- 
vidual quality as his impression of Irish bogland. He 
lodged at 26, Bryanstone Street, Portman Square, in 
1826; in 1829 and 1830 he was in Bloomsbury, at 
17, Great Russell Street, and afterwards at 7, Museum 
Street. His home in Norwich was still with his 
mother in Willow Lane. Both here and in London 
he was poor enough to have to develop his powers 
of walking. Thus, when in 1833 he had to go to 
London for an interview with the Bible Society, he 
walked up. The 112 miles took him 27I hours, and he 
was careful to relate that his total expenditure by the 



GEORGE BORROW 249 

way was fivepence halfpenny, on a roll of bread, two 
apples, a pint of ale, and a glass of milk. 

Seven years passed before Borrow was again more 
than a visitor to England. Then, in 1840, he married 
Mrs. Clarke, and settled in her house at Oulton. 
Oulton Cottage is gone, but its summer-house, a little 
peaked octagonal building with top-lights and win- 
dows, close to the edge of the Broad, survives under 
a mantle of ivy. Off and on, for about forty years, 
Sorrow's headquarters were at Oulton. In that 
summer-house he wrote or put together " The 
Zincali " and " The Bible in Spain," and wrote 
" Lavengro." The preface to the second edition of 
" The Zincali " paints the scene for us as it was to 
Borrow, as it took its place in Borrow's country. He 
was writing " The Bible in Spain." It was the year 
1841 : 

" I proceeded slowly — sickness was in the land, and 
the face of Nature was overcast — heavy rain-clouds 
swam in the heavens — the blast howled amid the pines 
which nearly surround my lonely dwelling, and the 
waters of the lake which lies before it, so quiet in 
general and tranquil, were fearfully agitated. ' Bring 
lights hither, O Hayim Ben Attar, son of the miracle I' 
And the Jew of Fez brought in the lights, for though 
it was midday I could scarcely see in the little room 
where 1 was writing. 

" A dreary summer and autumn passed by, and were 
succeeded by as gloomy a winter. I still proceeded 
with ' The Bible in Spain.' The winter passed and 
spring came with cold, dry winds and occasional sun- 
shine ; whereupon I arose, shouted, and, mounting my 
horse, even Sidi Hatismilk, I scoured all the sur- 



250 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

rounding district, and thought but little of ' The Bible 
in Spain.' 

" So I rode about the country, over the heaths, and 
through the green lanes of my native land, occasionally 
visiting friends at a distance, and sometimes, for 
variety's sake, I staid at home and amused myself by 
catching huge pike, which lie perdue in certain deep 
ponds skirted with lofty reeds, upon the land, and to 
which there is a communication from the lagoon by a 
deep and narrow watercourse. I had almost forgotten 
'The Bible in Spain.'" 

The book was finished, published, sold in large 
numbers. Borrow became a great man. In London 
he met Princes, Bishops, Ambassadors, and members 
of Parliament. In the country he wished to be a 
justice of the peace, but instead quarrelled with his 
neighbours, and earned a bad reputation by his vio- 
lence, his queerness, and his consorting with gipsies. 
He rode or walked about the country. He made an 
excursion into Hungary and Roumania in 1844. For 
his wife's health he moved to Yarmouth in 1853, and 
stayed until i860. He now — in 1853 — made the first 
of his longer tours in Britain. He walked over Corn- 
wall, from Plymouth to Land's End, and he visited 
his cousins at Trethinnick, his father's birthplace in 
the parish of St. Cleer's, near Liskeard. Wales, more 
especially North Wales, he walked over in a summer 
holiday in the following year. In 1856 he was in the 
Isle of Man ; in the next year he walked throughout 
south-west and central Wales. When his mother 
died in 1858, he recruited his health and spirits by a 
walk in the Highlands of Scotland. The holiday of 
1859 was spent in Ireland; his wife and stepdaughter 



GEORGE BORROW 251 

being left in Dublin, he walked to Connemara and the 
Giants' Causeway. 

In i860 Borrow and his wife and stepdaughter took 
a house at 22, Hereford Square, West Brompton. 
From there he used to stroll to the gipsy encampments 
of the suburbs or to his friend Gordon Hake at Roe- 
hampton, and on to the Bald-faced Stag in Kingston 
Vale or to Richmond, reciting from the Welsh or 
Scandinavian bards, admiring the scenery of the 
park with "Ah, this is England!" and bathing in the 
Pen Ponds. At Hake's he met Mr. Watts-Dunton. 
He did not give up his longer walks. Thus, in 1866, 
when his stepdaughter married a Belfast man, he 
visited the pair, and crossed to Scotland for a month's 
tour to Ecclefechan, Yetholm, Abbotsford, Melrose, 
Berwick, Edinburgh, Glasgow. Next year he deposited 
his wife at Bognor while he walked through Sussex 
and Hampshire to the New Forest. His wife died in 
1869. For a few years longer he continued in London ; 
Leland came to pay homage at Hereford Square in 
1870; in or about 1872 he was seen at Ascot, in the 
Cup week, by Francis Hindes Groome, stopping a row 
between gipsies and soldiers ; then in 1874 he went 
back again to Oulton Cottage. He still walked about 
the country, visited Norwich and the Norfolk Hotel ; 
but he was getting very old, and was left much 
alone. He still sang as he walked. The house was 
equally far past its prime ; man and house were 
neglected. Gipsies were allowed to camp on his land. 
He was a mysterious, impressive figure to strangers 
and children upon the road. Children called him 
" gipsy !" or '* witch !" not, " This is a man !" as a child 



252 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

did in Cornwall twenty-five years before. " Startled 
rowers on the lake" heard him chanting verses. He 
died in his bed, with no one else in the house, in 1881, 
and was taken to West Brompton cemetery to be 
buried beside his wife. 

Borrow's country may mean one of three very 
different things. There is the country with which he 
was personally connected — that is to say, Norwich and 
Household Heath, Oulton and Yarmouth. There is 
the country which he travelled with a notebook and 
described with a view partly to accuracy. There is 
the wild, weird, unsubstantial country of Ossian's 
poetry, of Goethe's " Erl-King," of Celtic legend, and 
of his own imagination, nourished on such food, but 
not born of it. He admired grandeur, which he 
described in " The Bible in Spain "and "Wild Wales"; 
for Byron also was among his prophets. But except 
when the grand was also mysterious, he produced no 
very remarkable effects. His business was not with 
forms, but with atmosphere. He knew no natural 
history. The outward e3^e was very little to him. 
He walked for the sun and the wind, for the joy 
and pride of his prowess in walking, and to get from 
one place to another. Therefore his country, save 
when he wrote as a descriptive tourist, is just English 
open country without motor-cars or even railways. 
It was what was essential to him, what had survived 
in his memory from childhood or youth on to middle 
age. It was as far as possible from poetic painting 
with the eye on the object. It cannot be indicated by 
statues, tablets, guides. " He could," said Mr. A. 
Egmont Hake, " draw more poetry from a wide- 



GEORGE BORROW 253 

spreading marsh, with its straggling rushes, than from 
the most beautiful scenery, and would stand and look 
at it with rapture." It was what he saw in it, not what 
was there for the photographer, that mattered, and is 
recorded in " Lavengro " and ** The Romany Rye." 
The rest concerns the tradespeople of Norwich and 
topographers who have to live. 



TENNYSON 

TENNYSON was more English, in a local sense, 
than any other poet except Michael Drayton, 
who put all the beauties and antiquities of England 
into his " Polyolbion." His wet meadows, his "long, 
dark, rank wood- walks drenched with dew," his cloudy 
wolds, his low sandy shores, compose a landscape such 
as everyone sees walking or riding in England. The 
weather is English weather of every varietur. The 
Tennysons were Yorkshire and Lincolnshire people, 
and the poet was born at Somersby Rectory in Lincoln- 
shire. He spent all his school days within the county, 
either at Louth or at home ; his free days and some of 
his nights on the wolds or by the shore of Lincoln- 
shire ; and FitzGerald said he should never have left 
" old Lincolnshire, where there were not only such 
good seas, but also such fine hill and dale among ' the 
wolds' which he was brought up in, as people in 
general scarce thought on." His earliest poems are 
full of the little things and the great things of that 
country — from the flowers and box-edges and "the 
seven elms, the poplars four," of his father's garden, 
and the brook below it, to the "ridged wolds," the 
"waste, enormous marsh," the sand-dunes and the sea. 
" The May Queen," said FitzGerald, was "all Lincoln- 
shire inland," as " Locksley Hall " was its seaboard. 

254 




OLD SOMERSBY RFXTORY 



TENNYSON 255 

The Rectory garden is seen and felt in the " Ode to 
Memory/' "The Blackbird," and "The Progress of 
Spring " : 

" The thicket stirs, 
The fountain pulses high in sunnier jets, 
The blackcap warbles, and the turtle purs, 
The starling claps his tiny castanets." 

The Somersby brook and its tributary " runlet tinkling 
from the rock " at Holywell, and its ** haunts of hern 
and crake " and " coot and hern," come again and 
again into Tennyson's poetry. It is the hill above 
Somersby that he climbs when he says : 

" From end to end 
Of all the landscape underneath, 
I find no place that does not breathe 
Some gracious memory of my friend ; 

" No grey old grange, or lonely fold. 
Or low morass and whispering reed. 
Or simple stile from mead to mead, 
Or sheepwalk up the windy wold ; 

"Nor hoary knoll of ash and haw 
That hears the latest linnet trill. 
Nor quarry trench'd along the hill 
And haunted by the wrangling daw." 

The '* old style " Northern Farmer, who asked when 
dying, " Do Godamoighty knaw what a's doing a-taakin' 
o' mea ?" was an old farm bailiff of eighty who said to 
a great-uncle of Tennyson's, "God A'mighty little knows 
what He's about a-taking me. An' Squire will be so 
mad an' all." The " new style " man was one in his 
neighbourhood who used to say, "When I canters my 
'erse along the ramper (highway), I 'ears * Proputt}^, 
proputty, proputty.'" Ruskin says somewhere that 



256 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

Tennyson's sea is practically always muddy North 
Sea. He must have a trained eye for mud who sees 
it in the ** slow-arching wave " of " The Last Tourna- 
ment," which, 

" Heard in dead night along that table shore, 
Drops flat, and after the great waters break 
Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves. 
Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud. 
From less and less to nothing." 

Tennyson, who was also something of a connoisseur, 
thought his native seas next after the Cornish seas. 

From Lincolnshire, at the age of eighteen, Tennyson 
went to Trinity College, Cambridge. At first the 
country was to him simply "disgustingly level," but 
the town and the country must have confirmed more 
than ever the taste for gardens, lawns, and marshland, 
which is consummately expressed in ** In Memoriam " 
often and in Mariana's grange — 

" About a stone-cast from the wall 

A sluice with blacken' d waters slept, 

And o'er it many, round and small, 
The cluster'd marish-mosses crept. 

Hard by a poplar shook alway, 
All silver-green with gnarled bark : 
For leagues no other tree did mark 

The level waste, the rounding grey " — 

albeit, as a matter of fact, the grange was no particular 
one, but one that *' rose to the music of Shakespeare's 
words, ' There, at the moated grange, resides this de- 
jected Mariana'": so said Tennyson himself. He also 
said that, if he was thinking of any particular mill in 
writing "The Miller's Daughter," it was Trumpington 
Mill, near Cambridge. " The Gardener's Daughter," 



TENNYSON 257 

again, written at Cambridge, has the atmosphere of a 
cathedral or University town, and the suburb fields : 

" A league of grass, wash'd by a slow broad stream, 
That, stirr'd with languid pulses of the oar, 
Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on. 
Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge 
Crown'd with the minster-towers." 

After leaving Cambridge, Tennyson lived at High 
Beech in Epping Forest, at Tunbridge Wells, at Boxley 
near Maidstone, and after his marriage, in 1850, at 
Warninglid, Sussex ; at Chapel House, Twickenham ; 
^arringford, in the Isle of Wight ; and Aldworth, near 
Haslemere. He also visited North and South Wales 
several times, Ireland, Cornwall, Devonshire, Dorset, 
Gloucestershire, Somersetshire, Yorkshire, Lincoln- 
shire, the New Forest, Bournemouth, Torquay. At 
one period of his life, he has told us, he used to 
chronicle in " four or five words or more " whatever 
struck him as picturesque in Nature, but without 
writing them down. Thus many were lost. He him- 
self, however, has recorded how he made the line 

" Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of 
change," 

when he was travelling by the first train from Liver- 
pool to Manchester in 1830. A vast crowd at the 
station hid the wheels, which he thought "ran in a 
groove." The phrase in ** Enoch Arden," 

" And isles alight in the offing," 

was made at Brighton on a day of sun and shadow, at 
sight of islands of light upon the sea. The " torrents 
of eddying bark," which Robin Hood points out on the 
17 



258 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

oak-trees in " The Foresters," were first noticed on the 
trunks of the Spanish chestnuts in Cowdray Park. The 
bark of these trees, on the left-hand side as you enter 
from Easebourne, has magnificent ascending spirals. 

The poet's own notes, and his son Lord Tennyson's, 
enable us to be certain of the origin of many descrip- 
tions which almost obviously were taken straight from 
a certain place at a certain time. The beeches and 
great hollies, the open fern and heath, the grove where 
Pelleas lies down, and it seems to him that 

" the fern without 
Burnt as a living fire of emeralds. 
So that his eyes were dazzled looking at it " 

— these are taken from the New Forest. But in " Pelleas 

and Ettarre " it is called the Forest of Dean. Another 

Hampshire scene is this of Bosham, noted on the spot 

for " Becket " : 

" Bosham, my good Herbert, 
Thy birthplace — the sea-creek— the petty rill 
That falls into it — the green field — the grey church." 

Then the town below the rocks, the quay, the bay, and 
the phosphorescent harbour-buoy, of " Audley Court," 
are drawn from Torquay as it was, and. Audley Court 
itself partly from Abbey Park. Apropos of the line in 
" The Brook," 

" When all the wood stands in a mist of green," 

Tennyson remarked that he remembered this moment 
as "particularly beautiful one spring" at Park House, 
near Maidstone, where his sister and brother-in-law, 
the Lushingtons, lived. The prologue to " The 
Princess " is founded on a fete and feast of the Maid- 



TENNYSON 259 

stone Mechanics' Institute held at Park House. A 
nightingale so very far north as Yorkshire, singing in 
an oblivious fearless " frenzy of passion " in a friend's 
garden, suggested the line in " The Princess," 

" Bubbled the nightingale and heeded not." 

The song 

" The splendour falls on castle walls " 

was written after the poet had been listening to a bugle 
blown under the " Eagle's Nest " at Killarney, which 
made eight distinct echoes. Windermere, it seems, 
may have suggested the Lady of the Lake 

" sitting in the deeps 
Upon the hidden bases of the hills," 

making Excalibur. While rowing there with FitzGerald 
in 1835 he repeated the lines with satisfaction. From 
a memory of Festiniog, in North Wales, came the image 
in " Geraint and Enid " of one 

" That listens near a torrent mountain-brook, 
All thro' the crash of the near cataract hears, 
The drumming thunder of the huger fall 
At distance. ..." 

The end of the poem was written in Wales. Both 
" The Marriage of Geraint " and " Geraint and Enid " 
have many possibly Welsh elements in their scenery ; 
for example, in Earl Yniol's castle, 

" a castle in decay, 
Beyond a bridge that spann'd a dry ravine . . ." 

and in the 

" Little town with towers, upon a rock, 
And close beneath, a meadow gemlike chased 
In the brown wild, and mowers mowing in it." 



26o A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

That section of " In Memoriam " comparing the hush 
of his song before the "deepest grief of all" to the hush 
of "half the babbling Wye " by the sea-tide was written 
at Tintern; but so also was "Tears, idle tears," which 
retains no trace of its origin. 

After Tennyson had a settled abode at Farringford 
and Aldworth as Laureate and family man, we know 
more than ever about the places where he wrote or 
from which he took details of his scenery. " Enoch 
Arden," e.g., was written in a summer-house " looking 
over Freshwater Bay, toward the downs," 

"a grey down 
With Danish barrows." 

" The Charge of the Light Brigade," " Aylmer's Field," 
" Boadicea," most of " Maud," and of the earlier " Idylls 
of the King," were written at Farringford. Much of 
the scenery of " Maud " comes from the Isle of Wight, 
and the last part of it, including 

" No more shall commerce be all in all, and Peace 
Pipe on her pastoral hillock a languid note," 

was written within sound of the ships' cannon in the 
Solent before the Crimean War. " Crossing the Bar " 
came to the poet during a crossing of the Solent after 
his illness in 1888-89. Above all, the invitation of 1854 
to F. D. Maurice, 

" Come, when no graver cares employ," 

contains a sketch of Farringford, its protecting pine- 
groves, the neighbouring down, and the view of sea, 
battleship, and seashore. 
At Aldworth " Balan and Balin," and many other 



tp:nnyson 261 

poems were written, and among them shorter pieces, 
like "The Ring," which include such glimpses as this, 

" A thousand squares of corn and meadow, far 
As the grey deep," 

of the surrounding landscape. 

Had Tennyson told us nothing of the sources of his 

details, much less would have been discovered. For 

though he was a note-taker and a curious observer and 

connoisseur of landscape, he had as a rule, like greater 

poets, in his mind's eye a country, whether wild or 

cultivated, which was more than a mere composite of 

consciously collected elements. All that can be said, 

as a rule, is that this country was English. And it 

was modern English, so that King Leodegran saw 

cultivated land, 

" A slope of land that ever grew, 
Field after field, up to a height, the peak 
Haze-hidden," 

just as Tennyson did ; while Enid had, like him, " a 
pool of golden carp " near her old home, and that old 
home was a tufted ruin of the nineteenth century. If 
there is one element peculiar to Tennyson, apart from 
the eye-seen accuracy of " oilily bubbled up the mere," 
it is that of the great house, its grove, park, and garden. 
The houses are clothed in vine or jasmine; they 
have honeysuckled porches; their gates are "griffin- 
guarded," or 

" A lion ramps at the top. 
He is claspt by a passion-flower ;" 

their groves are of lime or elm or acacia ; their gardens 
are rich in laurel, rose, lily, and lavender ; their hill- 



262 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

sides " redder than a fox " with beech buds ; and near 
by is a pool with water-lilies — 

" An English home : grey twilight pour'd 
On dewy pastures, dewy trees, 
Softer than sleep — all things in order stored, 
A haunt of ancient peace." 

Beyond the oaks of the park are wilder lands, moun- 
tains, wastes of gorse, cliffs and roaring seas ; but 
these are painted with a vividness and scrupulosity 
somewhere short of love. The poet is happiest of all 
where he mingles refined figures, knightly or gentle, 
with soft, sunny copses or gardens, as he does perhaps 
most perfectly in " The Lady of Shalott " or the frag- 
ment of '* Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere " : 

" Then, in the boyhood of the year, 
Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere 
Rode thro' the coverts of the deer, 
With blissful treble ringing clear. 

She seem'd a part of joyous Spring : 
A gown of grass-green silk she wore. 
Buckled with golden clasps before ; 
A light-green tuft of plumes she bore 
Closed in a golden ring." 

There are parks and tracts of low, warm downland 
in Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Hampshire, where spring 
or autumn often seems to translate into substance the 
spirit of Tennyson's typical poetry, where his Arthu- 
rian knights and ladies and his Cambridge scholars 
and poets would be exquisitely well placed. 



SWINBURNE 

SWINBURNE said that the sea and not the earth 
was his mother. The earliest enjoyment he could 
remember was being shot naked out of his father's arms, 
" like a stone from a sling," head foremost into the sea. 
His nickname was "Seamew" or "Seagull," which 
explains why he began " To a Seamew " with the 
lines, 

" When I had wings, my brother, 
Such wings were mine as thine/' 

and why in " On the Cliffs " he says " we seamews." 
When he came to write " Thalassius," an auto- 
biographical poem of the same class as Shelley's 
" Epipsychidion," he depicted a poet, born like himself 
in April, who was found on the sea-shore and nurtured 
by an old warrior poet in the lore of Liberty, Love, 
Hate, Hope, and Fear (i.e., "fear to be worthless the 
dear love of the wind and sea that bred him fearless "). 
The whole poem shows us what Swinburne would 
have wished to be, and to some extent what he thought 
himself. Thus the old warrior poet blesses him, or 
rather Thalassius : 

" Child of my sunlight and the sea, from birth 
A fosterling and fugitive on earth ; 
Sleepless of soul as wind or wave or fire, 
A man-child with an ungrown God's desire ; 
263 



2^4 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

Because thou hast loved naught mortal more than me, 
Thy father, and thy mother-hearted sea ; 
Because thou hast given thy flower and fire of youth 
To feed men's hearts with visions, truer than truth ; 
Because thou hast kept in those world-wandering eyes 
The light that makes one music of the skies ; 
Because thou hast heard with world-unwearied ears 
The music that puts light into the spheres ; 
Have therefore in thine heart and in thy mouth 
The sound of song that mingles north and south. 
The song of all the winds that sing of me. 
And in thy soul the sense of all the sea." 

In his own song as in his life, north and south were 
mingled. He was born in Belgravia, but spent half of 
his early years at his grandfather's house at Capheaton 
in Northumberland, half at East Dene, between Ventnor 
and Niton in the Isle of Wight. At " The Orchard," 
near East Dene, lived other relatives whose kindness he 
recalled in the dedication of " The Sisters " to the Lady 
Mary Gordon, his aunt. Near by, in Bonchurch grave- 
yard, he was buried. On the road between Newport 
and Shorwell in the Isle, he recited " When the 
hounds of spring are in winter's traces " before 
"Atalanta" was published. On the sands of Tyne- 
mouth three years before " Poems and Ballads," he 
recited the " Laus Veneris." And he preferred to think 
and call himself "a northern child of earth and sea," 
like Balen of Northumberland, whose pleasures, 
remembered at the point of death, were assuredly 
Swinburne's own : 

" The ioy that lives at heart and home. 
The joy to rest, the joy to roam, 
The joy of crags and scaurs he clomb, 
The rapture of the encountering foam 



SWINBURNE 265 

Embraced and breasted of the boy, 
The first good steed his knees bestrode, 
The first wild sound of songs that flowed 
Through ears that thrilled and heart that glowed, 

Fulfilled his death with joy." 

Like his Mary Stuart, he loved better the moors of 
the North, where "the wind and sun make madder 
mirth," than the South. He became a swimmer and 
climber who had to find utterance for his pride by 
making Tristram of Lyonesse also swimmer and climber. 
He climbed Culver Cliff in the Isle of Wight, ever 
before and ever since reputed to be inaccessible, to 
prove his nerve. It was a happiness, too, to place 
Tristram and Iseult in a Northumbrian Joyous Gard 
that is half Capheaton. He became the rider who put 
such zest into Mary Stuart's cry, " Oh that I were now 
in saddle !" and into the riding together of Tristram 
and Iseult. 

But Swinburne was more in the South than in the 
North. His school was Eton, his University Oxford, 
his regular abode for about thirty years Putney. His 
Northern scenes are mostly impassioned idealized 
memories. " Winter in Northumberland " is not equal 
to "By the North Sea." The moors, cliffs, and sea, 
of the North enter again and again into his poems 
in the form of images, and the dialect Northumbrian 
pieces are exquisite exercises ; but it was to the South 
that he turned when he took actual scenery for the 
subject of his poems, as he did after his youth was over. 

His earlier poems, dramatic and lyric, had no place 
for any distinctive landscape. Their country is either 
poets' country or a region somewhat " out of the eyes 
of worldly weather," "out of the sun's way, hidden 



266 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

apart," for what is there of sea and downs but the 
names in a verse like this ? — 

" The low downs lean to the sea ; the stream, 
One loose, thin, pulseless, tremulous vein. 

Rapid and vivid and dumb as a dream. 
Works downward, sick of the sun and the rain ; 

No wind is rough with the rank rare flowers ; 

The sweet sea, mother of loves and hours. 

Shudders and shines as the grey winds gleam. 
Turning her smile to a fugitive pain." 

It is, of course, very far from being pictorial in effect, 
or, I suppose, in purpose. It is subsiding to a state of 
mind like that verse in "On the Downs": 

" As a queen taken and stripped and bound 
Sat Earth discoloured and discrowned ; 

As a king's palace empty and dead 
The sky was, without light or sound, 
And on the summer's head 
Were ashes shed." 

It gives us no idea of what the poet saw, but a 
powerful one of what he thought about it. Later still 
he addressed " Heart's-ease Country " to Miss Isabel 
Swinburne, which begins, 

" The far green westward heavens are bland, 
The far green Wiltshire downs are clear," 

but tells us only that heart's-ease flourished there, and 
that the poet cared to rhyme and alliterate concerning 
them, and to draw the moral : 

"How hearts that love may find hearts' ease 
At every turn on every way." 

So, too, the '* Ballad of Bath " is a compliment, with 
less local habitation than name. 



SWINBURNE 267 

Where Swinburne is precise is in his coast scenes : 
at Tintagel with Tristram ; in Sark, thrilled by the sea 
and the memory of Hugo's visit, which he rendered 
into something more like music than painting; in 
Guernsey, where 

" The heavenly bay, ringed round with cliffs and moors, 
Storm-stained ravines, and crags that lawns inlay, 
Soothes as with love the rocks whose guard secures 
The heavenly bay ..." 

in that forsaken garden which is depicted with a nice- 
ness impossible to any less masterly versifier, 

" In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland, 
At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee, 
Walled round with rocks as an inland island. 

The ghost of a garden fronts the sea. 
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses 

The steep square slope of the blossomless bed 
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses 
Now lie dead. . . ." 

but above all on the coast of Norfolk and Suffolk. 
That coast, visited often during the years of his friend- 
ship with Mr. Watts-Dunton, is commemorated or 
created in many poems. His method is entirely his 
own, a potent alternation of bold and definite descrip- 
tion with raptures and reveries kindled by the landscape 
and seascape described. Thus, " In the Salt Marshes" 
opens with a general impression, a keynote to the 
scene and the meditation inspired by it : 

" Miles, and miles, and miles of desolation ! 

Leagues on leagues on leagues without a change ! 
Sign or token of some eldest nation 

Here would make the strange land not so strange. 
Time-forgotten, yea, since time's creation, 

Seem these borders where the sea-birds range. ' 



268 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

Stanzas follow where " the plumage of the rush- 
flower," the "clear grey steeples," and "the sharp 
straits " wandering — 

" In and out and in the wild way strives," 

— are set down as faithfully as from a notebook, but 
never without an interweaving of what further con- 
tributes to that first general impression : 

" Streak on streak of glimmering sunshine crosses 
All the land sea-saturate as with wine." 

Thus in the end it is no mere versification of scenery, 
but a composite and ideal landscape painting of 

" A land that is thirstier than ruin ; 
A sea that is hungrier than death ; 
Heaped hills that a tree never grew in ; 
Wide sands where the wave draws breath." 

No other English poet has achieved or even attempted 
anything on this scale so local in subject, so universal 
in effect. In " Evening on the Broads " perhaps there 
is too daring an attempt to make poetry of a piece of 
touring, but at its best this poetry is the legitimate 
union of an individual landscape with an individual 
mind, powerful enough to create for posterity a musical 
rather than a plastic impression inseparable from the 
original scene by any of Swinburne's lovers. The 
essence of it is very simple : one verse of the address to 
the Sun in " Dunwich " expresses it : 

" Time, haggard and changeful and hoary, 
Is master and God of the land : 
But the air is fulfilled of the glory 
That is shed from the lord's right hand. 



SWINBURNE 269 

O father of all of us ever, 

All glory be only to thee 
From heaven, that is void of the never, 
And earth, and the sea." 

If another verse be needed, it is the one answering 
the question, " Where is man ?" 

" Here is all the end of all his glory — 
Just grass and barren silent stones. 
Dead, like him, one hollow tower and hoary 
Naked in the sea-wind stands and moans, 
Filled and thrilled with its perpetual story ; 

Here, where earth is dense with dead men's bones." 

He adds Dunwich to the poets' country. By obser- 
vation, not naturalistic but spiritual, and by the 
emphasis of reverie and meditation, simple and con- 
ventional, but rapturous, he made that coast Swin- 
burne's country par excellence. 



THE NORTH 

WORDSWORTH 
EMILY BRONTE 



WORDSWORTH 

IT is more natural and legitimate to associate 
Wordsworth with certain parts of England than 
any other great writer. And for three reasons : he 
spent the greater portion of his life in one district ; he 
drew much of his scenery and human character from 
that district and used its place-names very freely in his 
poems ; and both he and his sister left considerable 
records of his times and places of composition. More- 
over, he wrote a guide to the Lakes and a poem that is 
not quite so useful as a guide-book, but much better. 

He was born at Cockermouth in Cumberland, his 
father being of old Yorkshire, his mother of old West- 
morland, stock. At Cockermouth, at Penrith where 
dwelt his mother's parents, and at Hawkshead where 
he went to school, Wordsworth spent his boyhood. 
Then in 1787, at the age of seventeen, he went to 
St. John's College, Cambridge. His vacations were 
spent in the Lake Country, on the banks of the Emont, 
in the Yorkshire dales and in Dovedale, and lastly on 
the Continent. Having taken his degree, he stayed for 
some time in London, took a walking tour, as usual 
with a companion, in North Wales, and revisited 
France in 1791-92. In 1793 he was again walking in 
England, in the Isle of Wight, across Salisbury Plain, 
and on to Bath, Bristol and the Wye. With his sister, 
18 273 



274 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

two jj^ears later, he settled in a farmhouse at Racedown, 
near Crewkerne in Dorset. There in 1797 Coleridge 
came over from Nether Stowey to see him. The visit 
was repaid, and within the year Wordsworth had 
settled at Alfoxden, three miles from Nether Stowey, 
and at the foot of the Quantocks. He stayed only one 
year at Alfoxden ; then walked again to Bristol, the 
Severn, and the Wye, with his sister. They and 
Coleridge wintered in Germany. Once more Words- 
worth walked in Yorkshire and the Lake Country. 
By the end of 1799 he and his sister had taken Dove 
Cottage, at Town End, Grasmere, which he had noticed 
in his wanderings. Coleridge and his wife visited them 
there in 1800. In 1802 Wordsworth married Mary 
Hutchinson of Penrith and brought her to Dove Cottage. 
After the birth of his first child in 1803, he made a tour 
of Scotland with his sister and Coleridge, visiting Scott 
at Lasswade. In 1806 the household consisted of 
Wordsworth, his wife, his sister, and his three children. 
Dove Cottage was too small for them, and the winter 
of 1806 was spent at the farmhouse of Coleorton in 
Leicestershire, near Wordsworth's friend. Sir George 
Beaumont. In 1808 they finally left Dove Cottage, but 
not Grasmere, for Allan Bank, which they changed for 
the Grasmere Parsonage in 181 1. Coleridge and De 
Quincey were their guests at Allan Bank. In 181 3 the 
Wordsworths, again with three children, instead of the 
five with whom they entered the Parsonage, moved to 
Rydal Mount, two miles away, above Rydal Lake. 
Whilst they lived few of them were long away from it. 
There Wordsworth himself died in 1850. His chief 
absences from Rydal were to see the Vale of Yarrow 



WORDSWORl^H 275 

with Hogg, the Ettrick shepherd, in 1814; to visit 
Switzerland and Italy in 1820, Belgium and Holland 
in 1823, North Wales in 1824, Belgium and the Rhine 
and Ireland in 1828, Abbotsford in 1831, Rome, 
Florence, and Venice, in 1837. At Rydal Mount he 
was himself visited by men as different as these scenes, 
while among his neighbours were De Quincey at Dove 
Cottage, Hartley Coleridge at Nab Cottage, Arnold of 
Rugby at Fox How, Southey at Keswick. 

Except at Racedown and at Coleorton, Wordsworth 
usually dwelt and wrote in a mountainous country. 
The earliest poem which he was content to save and 
publish is the " Extract from the conclusion of a poem 
composed in anticipation of leaving school." Nearly 
sixty years later he dictates to Miss Fenwick this 
characteristic note on it : 

** Written at Hawkshead. The beautiful image with 
which this poem concludes suggested itself to me 
while I was resting in a boat along with my com- 
panions under the shade of a magnificent row of 
sycamores, which then extended their branches from 
the shore of the promontory upon which stands the 
ancient, and at that time the more picturesque, Hall 
of Coniston, the seat of the Le Flemings from very 
early times." 

Then of " An Evening Walk," a long descriptive 
and local poem addressed to his sister, he could not 
refrain from quoting certain images, to explain that 
the shepherd directing his dog by waving his hat was 
seen "while crossing the Pass of Dunmaile Raise," 
and that the oak-tree " fronting the bright west " first 
struck him on the way from Hawkshead and Ambleside 



276 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

and gave him extreme pleasure. Several of the other 
early poems are connected by their titles with certain 
localities, such as the " Remembrance of Collins, 
composed upon the Thames near Richmond," the 
"Descriptive Sketches taking during a Pedestrian Tour 
among the Alps," the " Lines left upon a Seat in a 
Yew-tree, which stands near the Lake of Esthwaite." 
Then, "The Female Vagrant" of 1798 was part of a 
much longer poem called " Guilt and Sorrow : or 
Incidents upon SaHsbury Plain," written after his 
walk of 1793, which left "imaginative impressions" 
of a permanent force upon his mind. But even here 
some of the features "are taken from other desolate 
parts of England," while the vagrant woman was born 
on Derwent's side. This poem was finished at Race- 
down, where Wordsworth wrote also " The Bor- 
derers," and the story of " The Ruined Cottage," now 
a part of the first book of " The Excursion." 

Alfoxden and the neighbourhood of Coleridge stimu- 
lated Wordsworth towards the composition of some of 
his best and some of his best-known poems. "The 
Idiot Boy," "Her Eyes are Wild," "We are Seven," 
" The Thorn," and others, were the outcome of the 
plans made by the two poets on that famous walk 
from Alfoxden to Linton and the Valley of Stones, and 
back again, of which the chief product was " The 
Ancient Mariner." Wordsworth has told us that he 
met the heroine of " We are Seven " at Goodrich 
Castle during his visit to the Wye in 1793 ; that the 
Liswyn Farm of the " Anecdote for Fathers " was also 
on the Wye, whilst Kilve is near Alfoxden ; that "The 
Idiot Boy" was "composed in the groves of Alfoxden 



WORDSWORTH 277 

almost extempore," " A Whirl-Blast from behind the 
Hill " in the holly grove, the " Night-Piece " on the 
road between Nether Stowey and Alfoxden ; that 
" The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman " was 
written after a reading of Samuel Hearne's " North 
American Journey," and " The Last of the Flock " 
after seeing at Holford the incident described, both 
at Alfoxden. " The Thorn," he says, arose from his 
first noticing, on a stormy day, a certain thorn-tree on 
a ridge of the Quantocks, and thereupon resolving 
to invent something which should make the thorn 
permanently as impressive as the storm had made 
it for the moment. " Peter Bell " is another poem 
with Welsh as well as Somersetshire connexions. 
Peter's appearance was stolen from a " wild rover " 
with whom the poet walked from Builth almost to 
Hay ; but the number of his wives was " taken from 
the number of trespasses in this way of a lawless 
creature in the county of Durham." The story of 
" Ruth " came from Somersetshire ; the poem was 
written in Germany. 

But by far the greatest of Wordsworth's early poems 
inseparably related to a place is " Lines written above 
Tintern Abbey." Its thought culminated on the happy 
tour with his sister after leaving Alfoxden, and it took 
the final form of words during the four or five days' 
walking which brought the brother and sister from 
Tintern to Bristol, but was not written down until 
the last day. " No poem of mine," he said, " was 
composed under circumstances more pleasant for me 
to remember than this." 

But the poems so far mentioned are not so inseparably 



278 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

connected with the places of their subject or origin as 
those belonging to the years after Wordsworth had 
settled at Grasmere. For a time he had Coleridge 
again for a neighbour — at Greta Hall — and for a com- 
panion on his lesser walks and his excursion to the 
Highlands, talking and sharing his poetry and his 
private sadness. Wordsworth could have written 
the earlier poems, perhaps, anywhere ; the later ones 
must have been very different, if they had come to 
birth at all, in other surroundings. Wordsworth had 
long desired this Westmorland country. Moreover, 
when he came to write his " Guide to the Lakes," he 
soberly declared that, though there could be no rival- 
ship with Switzerland in bulk and height, " an eleva- 
tion of 3,000 feet is sufficient to call forth in a most 
impressive degree the creative, and magnifying, and 
softening powers of the atmosphere." He spoke of 
the clouds only to conclude that they made him think 
of ** the blank sky of Egypt," and of the cerulean 
vacancy of Italy, as an unanimated and even a sad 
spectacle." In his soberest and his wildest moments 
this country delighted him. If v\/^ith nothing else, it 
inspired him with gratitude; and in the same note 
where he says that " It was an April morning ! fresh 
and clear," was suggested by the wild, beautiful 
brook running through Easedale, he adds that he 
had " composed thousands of verses by the side of 
it." " To a Butterfly," " The Sparrow's Nest," the 
" Stanzas written in my Pocket Copy of Thomson's 
' Castle of Indolence,' " the three poems " To the 
Daisy," and the poem " To the Cuckoo," were written 
in the orchard at Dove Cottage. On the same day as 



WORDSWORTH 279 

"The Cuckoo" — on March 26, 1802 — Wordsworth 
wrote also " My Heart leaps up," but late at night. 
The other famous pieces written there include " The 
Idle Shepherd-Boys," "The Pet Lamb," the "Fare- 
well " addressed to the cottage when Wordsworth and 
his sister went to fetch Mrs. Wordsworth, " Louisa," 
" The Affliction of Margaret," " The Sailor's Mother," 
" Michael," " To the Small Celandine," " Yew-Trees," 
" She was a Phantom of Delight," " O Nightingale, 
thou surely art," " I wandered lonely as a Cloud," 
parts of the " Recluse." And Dorothy Wordsworth's 
journal gives many facts relating to the origin, the 
composition, and the revision, of the poems, and to 
the poet's state of mind during the process and the 
invariable fatigue following his concentration. The 
journal describes, for example, the walk on April 15, 
1802, a day of furious wind : 

" A few primroses by the roadside — wood-sorrel 
flower, the anemone, scentless violets, strawberries, 
and that starry, yellow flower which Mrs. C[larkson] 
calls pilewort. When we were in the woods beyond 
Gowbarrow Park we saw a few daffodils close to the 
waterside. We fancied that the sea had floated the 
seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung 
up. But as we went along there were more and yet 
more ; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we 
saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, 
about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never 
saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the 
mossy stones about and above them ; some rested their 
heads upon these stones, as on a pillow, for weariness ; 
and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed 
as if they verily laughed with the wind, that blew upon 



2So A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

them over the lake ; they looked so gay, ever glancing, 
ever changing." 

A more ordinary entry is that on Sunday, August 31, 
1 801, when the corn was cut, and the prospect, " though 
not tinged with a general autumnal yellow, yet softened 
down into a mellowness of colouring, which seems to 
impart softness to the forms of hills and mountains." 
At eleven Coleridge came from over Helvellyn while 
Dorothy was walking " in the still clear moonshine 
in the garden." Wordsworth being in bed, the two 
chatted till half-past three, and Coleridge read part 
of " Christabel." Next day they walked in the wood 
by Grasmere, Wordsworth read '* Joanna " and the 
" Firgrove " to Coleridge. The men bathed. Cole- 
ridge discovered a rock-seat among brambles in the 
orchard. . . . 

Miss Fenwick's notes from Wordsworth's dictation 
are even more precise, and one of them tells us that 
the old man in " Resolution and Independence " was 
met a few hundred yards from the cottage, and the 
account of him taken from his own mouth ; that the 
poet was in the state of feeling described at the 
beginning " while crossing over Barton Fell from 
Mr. Clarkson's, at the foot of Ullswater, towards 
Ashham," and the image of the hare was "observed 
on the ridge of the Fell." Then of " Hartleap Well," 
also written at Grasmere, he tells us that the first 
eight stanzas were composed extempore one winter 
evening not long after they had heard the story from 
a peasant as they were journeying in wild weather 
" from Sockburn on the banks of the Tees to Gras- 
mere." And '* there was not," says Myers, " in all that 



WORDSWORTH 281 

region a hillside walk or winding valley which has not 
heard him murmuring out his verses as they slowly 
rose from his heart." He mentions in particular the 
old upper road from Grasmere to Rydal as an habitual 
haunt, and also a green terrace on the Easedale side of 
Helm Crag, known as Under Lancrigg, where Words- 
worth composed much of the " Prelude," walking to 
and fro, humming the verses to himself, and then 
repeating them to his wife and sister, who sat by at 
their work. 

The move to Allan Bank and then to Rydal probably 
made no difference to Wordsworth's work, but " The 
Excursion " seems more naturally the work of a resident 
at Allan Bank than at Dove Cottage. Wordsworth was 
fortj^-three at the time of the second move and a dis- 
tributor of stamps, and his best moments were now 
separated by longer intervals. " The Skylark " was 
written at Rydal, but the more characteristic products 
of middle age and of that comparatively imposing 
residence were poems of a stiffer or statelier or some- 
times more classic nature, such as " Laodamia," " Dion," 
the "Vernal Ode," and the "Evening Ode, com- 
posed on an evening of extraordinary splendour and 
beauty." As much as ever he composed in the open 
air, so that one of his servants, on being asked permis- 
sion to see her master's study, led him to the library 
" where he keeps his books," but added, " His study is 
out of doors," and his cottage neighbours were glad to 
see him home from an absence, and to " hear him 
booing about again." His travels themselves were 
fruitful in two different ways — by the stimulus of 
novelty, or the stimulus of absence and deprivation. 



282 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

His Scottish tours gave him the stir and the impulse 
which led to " The Highland Reaper " and " Yarrow 
Revisited." The German visit of 1798 seems to have 
given the final pang of intensity which makes " Lucy 
Gray," "Ruth," "Nutting," the "Lucy" lyrics, so 
beautiful and so free from all immediate local colouring. 
" The White Doe of Rylstone " grew out of a tradition 
of Bolton Priory, which Wordsworth saw in 1807. 
London gave him " Star-Gazers " by the stimulus of 
novelt3^, and " The Reverie of Poor Susan " by the 
stimulus of absence. The sonnet on Westminster 
Bridge is not a local poem, but proves that Words- 
worth on a great occasion made no distinction between 
God-made country and man-made town. 



EMILY BRONTE 

EMILY BRONTE'S country is that tract of the 
West Riding of Yorkshire which is the scene of 
" Wuthering Heights " and of Mrs. Gaskell's " Life of 
Charlotte Bronte." She was born at Thornton in 1818, 
but by 1 820 the family had moved to Haworth Parsonage, 
where she was to die in 1848. Thornton was " desolate 
and wild ; great tracks of bleak land, enclosed by stone 
dykes, sweeping up Clayton Heights." 

Haworth left nothing undone that Thornton may 
have commenced. From their earliest years the six 
little children " used to walk out, hand in hand, 
towards the glorious wild moors, which in after-days 
they loved so passionately." Emily was seldom to leave 
this country, and never without learning how much 
she was part of it. When she was seven she was away 
with her sisters at school, "the pet nursling of the 
school," at Cowan's Bridge. After that home and the 
moors were her school. She and her sisters, Charlotte 
and Anne, " used to walk upwards towards the ' purple- 
black ' moors, the sweeping surface of which was broken 
by here and there a stone quarry ; and if they had 
strength , and time to go far enough, they reached a 
waterfall, where the beck fell over some rocks into 
the ' bottom.' They seldom went downwards through 
the village." She was " a tall, long-armed girl," " taller 

283 



284 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

than Charlotte," " full of power," " a strange figure — 
tall, slim, angular, with a quantity of dark brown hair, 
deep, beautiful hazel eyes that could flash with passion " 
— " kind, kindling, liquid eyes " — " features somewhat 
strong and stern, and the mouth prominent or reso- 
lute," "extremely reserved in manner. I distinguish 
reserve from shyness, because I imagine shyness 
would please if it knew how ; whereas reserve is in- 
different whether it pleases or not." She was happy 
with her sisters, or with her dog, walking on the moors. 
Three months away from them at another school, when 
she was sixteen, made her wretched. 

" My sister Emily," wrote Charlotte, " loved the 
moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in 
the blackest of the heath for her ; out of a sullen 
hollow in a livid hillside her mind could make an 
Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and 
dear delights ; and not the least and best loved was 
— liberty. Liberty was the breath of Emily's nostrils ; 
without it she perished. The change from her own 
home to a school, and from her own very noise- 
less, very secluded, but unrestricted and unartificial 
mode of life, to one of disciplined routine (though 
under the kindest auspices) was what she failed in 
enduring. Her nature proved here too strong for 
her fortitude. Every morning, when she woke, the 
vision of home and the moors rushed on her, and 
darkened and saddened the day that lay before her. 
Nobod}^ knew what ailed her but me. I knew only too 
well. In this struggle her health was quickly broken ; 
her white face, attenuated form, and failing strength> 
threatened rapid decline. I felt in my heart she would 
die if she did not go home, and with this conviction 
obtained her recall." 



EMILY BRONTE 285 

She returned home to bake the bread, iron the 
washing, read, and walk on the moors. Yet again, 
when she was seventeen, she went away from home 
to work as a teacher near Halifax. Again she gave 
v^ay and had to return home. For the last time 
she left home with Charlotte, at the age of twenty- 
four, to go to M. Heger's school at Brussels. There 
she had a vision of home which makes the first of 
her posthumous poems in Charlotte Bronte's edition : 

" There is a spot, 'mid barren hills, 

Where winter howls, and driving rain ; 
But if the dreary tempest chills, 
There is a light that warms again. 

" The house is old, the trees are bare, 

Moonless above bends twilight's dome ; 
But what on earth is half so dear — 
So longed for — as the hearth of home ? 

" The mute bird sitting on the stone. 

The dank moss dripping from the wall. 

The thorn-trees gaunt, the walks o'ergrown, 

I love them — how I love them all ! . . . 

" A little and a lone green lane 

That opened on a common wide ; 
A distant, dreamy, dim blue chain 
Of mountains circling every side 

"A heaven so clear, an earth so calm, 
So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air ; 
And, deepening still the dream-like charm. 
Wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere. . . ." 

Once back at Haworth, she never left it, though for 
some time she had not the company of her sisters or 
even her brother. She had her bulldog and Anne's 
spaniel and the cats. In distinguishing Emily's love 
of animals from Charlotte's, Mrs. Gaskell reveals Emily: 
" The helplessness of an animal was its passport to 



286 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

Charlotte's heart ; the fierce, wild intractability of its 
nature was what often recommended it to Emily." 
Charlotte took many traits of Shirley's character from 
Emily, such as her reading on the rug with her arm 
round her rough bulldog's neck; her giving a mad 
dog a drink, being bitten by it, and then searing the 
bite with a red-hot iron without telling anyone. She 
loved the bulldog, as she also punished him, without 
fear. 

She fits into the moorland — she is part of it — like the 
curlew and the heather, and she herself knew it. The 
moorland was a necessity to her, but it was also her 
chief pleasure and joy. Her poems always imply it, 
and often express it. These stanzas are among the 
most explicit : 

" Awaken, o'er all my dear moorland, 
West-wind, in thy glory and pride ! 
Oh ! call me from valley and lowland 
To walk by the hill-torrent's side ! 

" It is swelled with the first snowy weather ; 
The rocks they are icy and hoar, 
And sullenly waves the long heather, 
And the fern leaves are sunny no more. 

" There are no yellow stars on the mountain ; 
The bluebells have long died away 
From the brink of the moss-bedded fountain. 
From the side of the wintry brae. 

" But lovelier than corn-fields all waving 
In emerald, and vermeil, and gold. 
Are the heights where the north-wind is raving, 
And the crags where I wandered of old." 

So great was her love that the genius of the moorland 
says to her in one poem : 



EMILY BRONTE 287 

" Few hearts to mortals given, 
On earth so wildly pine ; 
Yet few would ask a heaven 
More like this earth than thine." 

She asked for nothing, while she was on this earth 
and on the moor, save her own heart and liberty. Her 
poems and her life, in fact, reveal her as a wild spirit, as 
what Byron seemed in his poetry when he had a back- 
ground of mountains and thunder. Her background is 
the everlasting wild itself and " Wuthering Heights." 
She " rides on the whirlwind " in the country described 
in the first chapter of that book : 

"'Wuthering' being a significant provincial adjective 
descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its 
station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing 
ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed : 
one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over 
the edge by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at 
the end of the house, and by a range of gaunt thorns 
all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms 
of the sun. . . ." 

For a moment sometimes she lets in the " soft thaw 
winds and warm sunshine " — " I only see two white 
spots on the whole range of moors : the sky is blue, 
and the larks are singing, and the becks and brooks are 
all brim full" — but they chiefly emphasize the cold, 
gaunt grey which they relieve. She herself would 
have had a heaven after this pattern, as she says again : 

" We would not leave our nature home 
For any world beyond the tomb. 
No, mother, on thy kindly breast 
Let us be laid in lasting rest, 
Or waken but to share with thee 
A mutual immortality." 



288 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

** The action," said Rossetti, " of ' Wuthering Heights * 
is laid in hell." Charlotte Bronte, pretending that her 
sister was " Ellis Bell," said : 

"The statuary found a granite block on a solitary 
moor. Gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag 
might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister ; a 
form moulded with at least one element of grandeur 
— power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from 
no model but the vision of his meditations. With 
time and labour the crag took human shape ; and 
there it stands, colossal, dark, and frowning, half 
statue, half rock : in the former sense, terrible and 
goblin-like ; in the latter, almost beautiful. For its 
colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes 
it ; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fra- 
grance, grows faithfully close to the giant's foot." 

But not even Charlotte Bronte can have seen that 
not only had shapes like the hard race of men been 
carved out of that rock, but one like an immortal 
mountain nymph — Emily herself. 



SCOTLAND 

BURNS 
SCOTT 
STEVENSON 



19 



BURNS 

BURNS'S country was the Western Lowlands of 
Scotland. Burns was the Lowlands of Scotland. 
The poor, free peasantry culminated in him. Poetry 
does not sum up, but his poetry was the flower and 
the essence of that country and its peasantry. H« 
was great because they were all at his back, their life 
and their literature. To speak of his country is merely 
to consider a few scatterings of the elements which he 
mixed into lasting songs. A clay cottage at Alloway, 
near Ayr, was his birthplace. His father held seven 
acres there, and built the house. While Burns was 
still a small schoolboy they took a larger farm near-by, 
and at fifteen he began to work on the poorest land in 
Ayrshire as his father's chief servant. Not till he 
was eighteen did they move to Lochlie, a larger farm 
still, in the parish of Tarbolton. For a year he was 
away at Irvine as a flax-dresser. He and his brother 
Gilbert took Mossgiel Farm, three miles from Lochlie 
in 1783. Next year his father died. He had written 
some of the poems we know at Lochlie, but he wrote 
most at Mossgiel and at Ellisland in Dumfriesshire, 
which he took in 1789. 

The best account of Burns's country from a visitor is 
that written by Keats in July, 1818, when he walked 

291 



292 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

through it. The " richly meadowed, wooded, heathed, 
and rivuleted " land, " with a grand sea view terminated 
by the black mountains of the Isle of Arran," outwent 
his expectations. 

" I had," he says, " no conception that the native 
place of Burns was so beautiful ; the idea I had was 
more desolate. His *rigs of barley' seemed always 
to me but a few strips of green on a cold hill. O 
prejudice ! it was as rich as Devon. . . . We came 
down upon everything suddenly : there were in our 
way the ' bonny Doon,' with the brig that Tam o' 
Shanter crossed, Kirk Alloway, Burns's cottage, and 
the Brigs of Ayr. First we stood upon the bridge 
across the Doon, surrounded by every phantasy of 
green in tree, meadow, and hill : the stream of the 
Doon, as a farmer told us, is covered with trees 
* from head to foot ' — you know those beautiful heaths 
so fresh against the weather of a summer's evening 
— there was one stretching along behind the trees." 

Burns saw it differently. He was a peasant, and 
had lived on the earth. True, there were moments, 
after he had been to Edinburgh and toured a little, 
when he thought more of Ossian's country than of 
fishing towns and fertile carses. But he could not do 
without the fertile carses, and it is more characteristic 
of him to relate how he "rambled over the rich, fertile 
carses of Falkirk and Stirling, and was delighted with 
their appearance : richly waving crops of wheat, barley, 
etc., but no harvest at all yet, except, in one or two 
places, an old-wife's ridge." These were the necessi- 
ties. Luxuries and necessities also were to be found 
near at hand in the Lowlands, in the woods about 



BURNS 293 

the Ayr, " the fragrant birch and hawthorn hoar," or 
where 

" The braes ascend, like lofty wa's, 
The foaming stream deep-roaring fa's, 
O'erhung wi' fragrant spreading shaws, 
The birks of Aberfeldy." 

He was a peasant, but he was a rambler also. So 
little of a Presbyterian was he that he approved of 
"set times and seasons of more than ordinary acts 
of devotion, for breaking in on that habituated routine 
of life and thought which is so apt to reduce our 
existence to a kind of instinct, or even sometimes, and 
with some minds, to a state very little superior to mere 
machinery." So he wrote on New Year's Day morning 
in 1789. ''This day," he continued, "the first Sunday 
of May ; a breezy blue-skyed noon some time about 
the beginning, and a hoary morning and calm sunny 
day about the end, of autumn — these, time out of mind, 
have been with me a kind of holiday." In autumn, he 
said, he wrote more verses than in all the rest of the 
year, when 

"the ev'ning's clear, 
Thick flies the skimming swallow ; 
The sky is blue, the fields in view, 
All fading green and yellow. ..." 

The letter where he says so shows us the rambler, for 
he tells George Thomson : " That tune, ' Cauld Kail,' 
is such a favourite of yours that I once more roved out 
yesterday for a gloamin'-shot at the Muses." He com- 
posed, with a tune in his head, while he was walking 
or riding. 

His poetry shows us the delicate wild country at the 



294 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

edge of the ploughland or in the midst of it, which is 
the more delicate for the contrast, and perhaps for the 
fact that the poet had so long known the plough. It 
has the freshness of the line common in folk-songs : 

" As I walked forth one midsummer morning." 

Burns walks forth "to view the corn an' snuff the 
caller air." So the Muse saw him in " The Vision ": 

*' When ripen'd fields and azure skies 
Call'd forth the reaper's rustling noise, 
I saw thee leave their evening joys, 

And lonely stalk, 

To vent thy bosom's swelling rise. 

In pensive walk." 

He loves the corn and the roses, the scent of beanfields 
and of wild foliage. He muses early in the summer 
morning by Nith side. The briers and woodbines 
budding, the partridges calling, "inspire his Muse." 
He loves the woods, and laments their destruction as 
keenly, though with anger, as Cowper or Wordsworth. 
He loves, too, the single tree in the field, and praises 
the tree as well as the girl when he compares her with 

" yon youthful ash 
That grows the cowslip braes between, 
And drinks the stream with vigour fresh." 

He ranges from the scene of " Countrie Lassie " — 

" In simmer, when the hay was mawn, 
And corn wav'd green in ilka field, 
While claver blooms white o'er the lea, 
And roses blaw in ilka bield . . ." 



BURNS 295 

up to the burn that strays in "gowany glens" — 

" Where bonnie lasses bleach their claes ; 
Or trots by hazelly shaws and braes, 

Wi' hawthorns grey, 
Where blackbirds join the shepherds' lays 
At close o' day ..." 

— and even up to the curlew's moorland. 

How much he loved the Highland, "where savage 
streams tumble over savage mountains, thinly over- 
spread with savage flocks, which sparingly support as 
savage inhabitants," is not quite plain. I think that he 
as an individual inclined to love the mountains, but 
that his ancestry mixed a kind of fear or hate with his 
love. The ** muirs an' dizzy crags " were the play- 
ground of "warlocks grim an' wither'd hags," and not 
only of " Caledonia, thy wild heaths among." Without 
Peggy's charms, what would he have done 

"Where, braving angry winter's storms, 
The lofty Ochils rise " ? 

What, without the other sweet lassie of parentage 
humble, would he have said of 

" Yon wild mossy mountains sae lofty and wide, 
That nurse in their bosom the youth o' the Clyde, 
Where the grouse lead their coveys thro' the heather to feed, 
And the shepherd tents his flock as he pipes on his reed " ? 

To generation after generation of his ancestors the 
mountains must have been indifferent when not dan- 
gerous. If he loved them apart from passing associa- 
tions, it was as symbols of the eternal and unconfined. 
And so with winter and wild weather. Many of his 
poems show the ancient agricultural man's love of 



296 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

spring and fine weather. In the winter night he thinks 
of the silly sheep on the hills, and the helpless bird, and 
though he can pass the time in rhyme, yet 

"While frosty winds blaw in the drift, 
Ben to the chimla-lug 
I grudge a wee the great folks' gift, 
That live sae bien an' snug." 

If he had not himself been starved with cold, there was 
that in him which knew what it meant. When he 
sings, 

" The birds sit chittering on the thorn, 
A' day they fare but sparely. 
And lang's the night frae e'en to morn — 
I'm sure it's winter fairly," 

he is looking out as a peasant whose fires have not 
always roared. Yet in May he could write of " Coila's 
haughs an' woods," 

" When lintwhites chant amang the buds, 
And jinkin' hares, in amorous whids, 
Their loves enjoy ;" 

and also of the joys of winter : 

" Ev'n winter bleak has charms to me, 
When winds rave thro' the naked tree ; 
Or frosts on hills of Ochiltree 

Are hoary grey ; 
Or Winding drifts wild-furious flee, 

Dark'ning the day !" 

He loved winter as he did the mountains, and probably 
the sea in the same wa}^, though the Muse did claim to 
have seen him "seek the sounding shore, delighted 
with the dashing roar." She said, too, that she had 
seen him struck by "Nature's visage hoar" under the 



BURNS 297 

north wind, and he has told us himself that "There is 
scarcely any earthly object gives me more — I don't 
know if I should call it pleasure, but something which 
exalts me, something which enraptures me — than to 
walk in the sheltered side of a wood or high plantation, 
in a cloudy winter day, and hear a stormy wind howl- 
ing among the trees and raving o'er the plain." Yet it 
is, as it were, against a background of such weather 
that his spring gentleness is so gentle, as it is against 
a background of winter, of mountains, and of hard 
labour at the plough, that his flowers and green leaves 
and bright waters are so sweet. 



SCOTT 

SCOTT'S country was Scotland, as Michael Dray- 
ton's was England and Wales. Had he had a 
mind to, he might have emulated Drayton's " Choro- 
graphical Description of all the Tracts, Rivers, Moun- 
tains, Forests, and other Parts of this Renowned Isle 
of Great Britain," as Drayton might have emulated 
Scott at a story had he had a mind to. 

Before he was three Scott left Edinburgh for the 
country of his ancestors, and came to live at Sandy- 
Knowe Farm in Tweeddale. It was thought that 
*' natural exertion, excited by free air and liberty," might 
restore the use of his lame right leg; and he says him- 
self that " the impatience of a child soon inclined me to 
struggle with my infirmity, and I began by degrees to 
stand, to walk, and to run," to become " a healthy, 
high-spirited, and, my lameness apart, a sturdy child." 
Sixty years later, when Lockhart was writing his Life, 
there were two old women living who had been servants 
at Sandy-Knowe when Scott arrived there, and could 
remember him. 

"The young ewe-milkers delighted," said one of 

the two, "to carry him about on their backs among 

the crags ; and he was * very gleg (quick) at the 

298 



SCOTT 299 

uptake, and soon learned every sheep and lamb 
by headmark as well as any of them.' His great 
pleasure, however, was in the society of the ' aged 
hind' recorded in the epistle to Erskine, 'auld Sandy 
Ormiston,' called from the most dignified part of his 
function ' the Cow-bailie,' who had the chief super- 
intendence of the flocks that browsed upon * the velvet 
tufts of loveliest green.' If the child saw him in the 
morning, he could not be satisfied unless the old man 
would set him astride on his shoulder, and take him to 
keep him company as he lay watching his charge. The 
Cow-bailie blew a particular note on his whistle, which 
signified to the maid-servants in the house below when 
the little boy wished to be carried home again. He 
told his friend, Mr. Skene of Rubislaw, when spending 
a summer day in his old age among those well-remem- 
bered crags, that he delighted to roll about in the grass 
all day long in the midst of the flock, and that * the 
sort of fellowship he thus formed with the sheep and 
lambs had impressed his mind with a degree of affec- 
tionate feeling towards them which had lasted through- 
out life.' There is a story of his having been forgotten 
one day among the knolls, when a thunder-storm came 
on; and his aunt, suddenly recollecting his situation, 
and running out to bring him home, is said to have 
found him lying on his back, clapping his hands at the 
lightning, and crying out, * Bonny ! bonny !' at every 
flash." 

In the introduction to the third canto of ** Marmion," 
Scott tells Erskine that he is now aping " the measure 
wild of tales that charmed him yet a child," and that 
there above the Tweed 

" was poetic impulse given, 
By the green hill and clear blue heaven. 



300 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

He learned to know men and earth and history 
together. The local information, he says, which had 
some share in forming his tastes, came from " the old 
songs and tales which then formed the amusement 
of a retired Border family " — 

" Of lovers' slights, of ladies' charms, 
Of witches' spells, of warriors' arms ; 
Of patriot battles, won of old 
By Wallace wight and Bruce the bold ; 
Of later fields of feud and fight, 
When, pouring from their Highland height, 
The Scottish clans, in headlong sway, 
Had swept the scarlet ranks away." 

For the most part there were few to talk down to 
him, except, of course, in school hours, and he hits on 
a very good simple thing when he says: " I rather sus- 
pect that children derive impulses of a powerful and 
important kind in hearing things which they cannot 
entirely comprehend ; and, therefore, that to write 
down to children's understanding is a mistake; set 
them on the scent, and let them puzzle it out." He 
read Homer, '* a few traditionary ballads," and the old 
songs collected by Allan Ramsay. He says also that 
Dodsley's account of Shenstone's Leasowes made 
him envy the poet's grounds more than his " pipe, 
crook, flock, and Phillis to boot "; that he never forgot 
a phrase from an almanack of Charles II.'s time, ad- 
vising the reader in June to walk for his health's sake 
" a mile or two every day before breakfast, and, if he 
can possibly so manage, to let his exercise be taken 
upon his own land." This, then, was the boy that was 
father to the man Walter Scott. 

Then, in 1778, at seven years old, he went to the 



SCOTT 301 

High School of Edinburgh. He grew too fast, became 
delicate, and was again transplanted to the country, 
this time to an aunt's at Kelso upon the Tweed. All 
his time, except four hours at the village grammar- 
school, was now his own. He read Shakespeare and 
Spenser, Percy's " Reliques of Ancient Poetry," and 
the novelists. And his feeling for natural beauty was 
awakened for the first time. 

''The neighbourhood of Kelso," says Scott him- 
self, " the most beautiful, if not the most romantic 
village in Scotland, is eminently calculated to awaken 
these ideas. It presents objects, not only grand in 
themselves, but venerable from their association. The 
meeting of two superb rivers, the Tweed and the 
Teviot, both renowned in song — the ruins of an 
ancient abbey — the more distant vestiges of Roxburgh 
Castle — the modern mansion of Fleurs, which is so 
situated as to combine the ideas of ancient baronial 
grandeur with those of modern taste, are in themselves 
objects of the first class, yet are so mixed, united, 
and melted, among a thousand other beauties of a 
less prominent description, that they harmonize into 
one general picture, and please rather by unison than 
by concord. I believe I have written unintelligibly 
upon this subject, but it is litter for the pencil than the 
pen. The romantic feelings which I have described 
as predominating in my mind naturally rested upon 
and associated themselves with these grand features 
of the landscape around me ; and the historical in- 
cidents, or traditional legends connected with many of 
them, gave to my admiration a sort of intense impres- 
sion of reverence, which at times made my heart feel too 
big for its bosom. From this time the love of natural 
beauty, more especially when combined with ancient 



302 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

ruins, or remains of our fathers' piety or splendour, 
became with me an insatiable passion, which, if cir- 
cumstances had permitted, I would willingly have 
gratified by travelling over half the globe." 

In his youth and early manhood he visited most of 
his native land and of its coast, and saw mountains 
which were as grand as the lesser hills of Tweeddale, 
wild, but not unkind, had seemed to the imagination of 
childhood. 

While still a boy he "entered upon the dry and barren 
wilderness of forms and conveyances " with his father 
in Edinburgh, but at the same time composed romances 
in friendly rivalry with a friend, which were rehearsed 
upon their walks " to the most solitary spots about 
Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags." He would walk 
out to breakfast at Prestonpans, and return at evening. 
The Law formed a background for a very picturesque 
Freedom. He had, for example, "a dreamy way of 
going much farther than he intended " when he was 
walking or riding or fishing above Howgate, and he 
tells us how on one occasion the beauty and the 
hospitality of Pennycuik House " drowned all recollec- 
tion of home for a day or two." When his father pro- 
tested that he was meant for a pedlar, the lad was not 
offended. His principal object was to see romantic 
scenery and places of historic interest. The field of 
Bannockburn and the landscape seen from Stirling 
Castle equally attracted him. So vividly could he 
people scenes with " combatants in their proper cos- 
tume " that he kept a fellow traveller awake by his 
picture of the assassination of the Archbishop of St. 
Andrews, crossing Magus Moor. 



SCOTT 303 

Having put on the gown of an advocate, Scott was 
often free to put it off and take longer excursions 
northward or southward. On his first autumn vaca- 
tion, for example, he used Kelso as a centre for travels 
as far afield as Flodden and Hexham. He shot wild- 
duck and the gulls, herons, and cormorants, that flew 
past his reading nest in a tree above the Tweed. He 
coursed hares. This was the "Life in the Forest" 
which he celebrated afterwards in the poem beginning, 

"On Ettrick Forest's mountains dun 
'Tis blithe to hear the sportman's gun," 

and ending, 

" 'Tis blithe at eve to tell the tale, 
How we succeed and how we fail, 
Whether at Alwyn's lordly meal, 
Or lowlier board of Ashestiel ; 
While the gay tapers cheerly shine, 
Bickers the fire and flows the wine — 
Days free from thought, and nights from care, 
My blessing on the forest fair !" 

At this time also Scott made the first of his seven 
"annual raids" into Liddersdale, to see the ruins of 
Hermitage Castle, and to gather " riding ballads" from 
descendants of the moss-troopers. Hence came his 
material for the *' Minstrelsy of the Border " and the 
character of Dandie Dinmont (William Elliot of Mill- 
burnholm Farm). 

It was to make himself acquainted with the case of 
a drunken minister of Girthon, for one of his first 
briefs, that Scott went to Galloway. He was thus, 
according to Lockhart, carried into the scenery of 
" Guy Mannering " for the first and only time ; " and 



304 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

several of the names of the minor characters of the 
novel {M'Giiffog, for example), appear in the List of 
witnesses." 

In a long series of vacation journeys, Scott saw the 
country in which the heroes of his poems and novels 
were shortly to move. Travelling from house to house 
of his legal friends in one early vacation, he met at 
Tullibody an old laird who had been received by 
Rob Roy " in a cavern exactly such as that of Bean 
Lean "; with the laird of Cambusmore he saw Loch 
Katrine, and made the first of those " merry expedi- 
tions " which were always associated in his mind with 
the scenery of " The Lady of the Lake "; Craighall 
in Perthshire was the original of Tully-Veolan in 
" Waverley "; from Meigle in Forfarshire he visited 
Dunottar Castle, and in the churchyard met Peter 
Paterson, "Old Mortality." Stopping at Halgards in 
Tweeddale, in a vacation of 1797, "he had his first 
and only interview with David Ritchie, the original 
of his Black Dwarf." Thence he went on among the 
English Lakes, and with Gilsland as centre saw "Skid- 
daw's dim and distant head," " Helvellyn's cliffs sub- 
lime," "Glaramara's ridgy back," " Red Penrith's Table 
Round " — the scenery of " The Bridal of Triermain." 
Among the party at Gilsland, Scott found the lady, 
Charlotte Margaret Carpenter, whom he was to make 
his wife before the end of the year. 

In the summer after their marriage, Scott and his 
wife took a cottage six miles from Edinburgh, at 
Lasswade on the Esk, in a neighbourhood full of 
friends and of friends to be. A year later, 1799, 
Scott was appointed Sheriff-depute of Selkirkshire. 



SCOTT 305 

This office gave him yet another centre, the inn at 
Clovenford on the road from Edinburgh to Selkirk, 
Thus he could learn Ettrick Forest, the vales of 
Ettrick and Yarrow, St. Mary's Lake and Roslin. He 
made friends there with William Laidlaw and his wife, 
of Blackhouse on the Douglas-burn, who helped him, 
says Lockhart, to the greater part of the characters of 
Dandie Dinmont, his wife and their house at Charlies- 
hope. Through Laidlaw Scott met James Hogg, who 
had been shepherd for ten years to Laidlaw's father. 
Hogg was to detect Scott's hand in "The Black 
Dwarf" when he read a word for word repetition in 
it of a discussion in 1801 on long sheep and short 
sheep. Scott was now beginning a first draft of " The 
Lady of the Lake," with Loch Katrine and its neigh- 
bourhood for the scene of it. 

"I took," says he, "uncommon pains to verifj'^ the 
accuracy of the local circumstances of this story. I 
recollect, in particular, that, to ascertain whether I 
was telling a probable tale, I went into Perthshire, 
to see whether King James could actually have ridden 
from the banks of Loch Vennachar to Stirling Castle 
within the time supposed in the poem, and had the 
pleasure to satisfy myself that it was quite practicable." 

But " The Lay of the Last Minstrel " was to precede 
" The Lady of the Lake." It was written at the Lass- 
wade cottage where John Stoddart paid him a visit 
and repeated passages from Coleridge's unpublished 
" Christabel," which gave Scott the hint for his narra- 
tive metre. Wordsworth came there in the autumn of 
20 



3o6 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

1803, and Scott read aloud for him the first four cantos. 
Scott's knowledge of men, Nature, history, and tradi- 
tion, went blithely into the story, and Wordsworth, 
like all the world, was delighted. The scene was his 
own country. He must have ridden the same paths 
as William of Deloraine, from Teviot side to where 

"Old Melros' rose, and fair Tweed ran." 

Few bards could have exclaimed, other things being 
equal, with less untruth than Scott, through the lips of 
his last minstrel : 

" O Caledonia ! stern and wild, 
Meet nurse for a poetic child ! 
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood, 
Land of the mountain and the flood, 
Land of my sires ! what mortal hand 
Can e'er untie the filial band 
That knits me to thy rugged strand ! 
Still as I view each well-known scene, 
Think what is now and what hath been, 
Seems as to me, of all bereft, 
Sole friends thy woods and streams were left ; 
And thus I love them better still, 
Even in extremity of ill. 
By Yarrow's stream still let me stray, 
Though none should guide ray feeble way, 
Still feel the breeze down Ettrick break. 
Although it chill my wither'd cheek ; 
Still lay my head by Teviot Stone, 
Though there, forgotten and alone, 
The Bard may draw his parting groan." 

But the success of this poem set Scott free to 
exchange the servitude of law for that of literature. 
Already in 1804 — the " Lay " appeared in 1805 — he had 
settled at Ashestiel, on the Upper Tweed, in wilder 



SCOTT 307 

country, only thirty miles from Edinburgh. There he 
wrote " Marmion " and the introduction beginning : 

" November's sky is chill and drear, 
November's leaf is red and sere : 
Late, gazing down the sleepy linn, 
That hems our httle garden in. . . ." 

There he could mingle writing, entertaining, and 
coursing, by means of rising early. And when the 
lease of Ashestiel was out in 181 1, he could afford to 
buy an estate a few miles lower down the river, and 
the greeting of " laird of Abbotsford." 

Thenceforward he was giving out almost as much 
as he received. His life was mostly either travelling 
by hill and water, or sitting still with a pen ; his 
recreations, " the musing ramble among his own 
glens, the breezy ride over the moors, the merry spell 
at the woodman's axe, or the festive chase of Newark, 
Fernilee, Hanging-Shaw, or Deloraine ; the quiet old- 
fashioned contentment of the little domestic circle, 
alternating with the brilliant phantasmagoria of ad- 
miring, and sometimes admired, strangers — or the 
hoisting of the telegraph flag that called laird and 
bonnet-laird to the burning of the water, or the 
wassail of the hall." He had begun to live and to 
write at Abbotsford (in 1812) when there was only 
one room habitable, and that surrounded by masons 
working. Planting, buying more land, " completing" 
the house, receiving tourists, while he worked and his 
children grew up, he lived here chiefly until his death, 
but kept on until 1826 the house at 39, Castle Street, 
Edinburgh, which he had taken in 1802 soon after his 
marriage. But his books flowed mainly out of those 
old " raids " on the Border. Over and over again we 



3o8 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

can see the particular receiving which corresponds to 
the particular giving out. For example, there was an 
alarm of French invasion while Scott and his wife 
were at Gilsland on holiday. He, being a quarter- 
master and light-horseman in the Volunteer Cavalry, 
rode hard to join his troop at Dalkeith. It was a false 
alarm. The result was " The Bard's Incantation ": 

" The forest of Glenmore is drear, 
It is all of black pine and the dark oak-tree; 
And the midnight wind to the mountain deer 
Is whistling the forest lullaby. . . . 

He called upon the " minstrels and bards of other 
days," the " souls of the mighty," to sing a mighty 
strain against " Gaul's ravening legions," and had the 
answer from " the dread voice of other years ": 

"When targets clash'd, and bugles rung, 
And blades round warriors' heads were flung, 
The foremost of the band were we, 
And hymn'd the joys of Liberty." 

In *' The Antiquary " he used over again the 
same incident. Another case is the description, in 
*' A Legend of Montrose," of the steep pass up into 
the Highlands from the Lowlands of Perthshire. 
"The beautiful pass of Lessy, near Callender, in 
Menteith," says Scott's footnote, "would in some 
respects answer his description." This way, where 
Montrose met Dugald Dalgetty, Scott himself must 
have gone more than once. But Scott did not use 
photography. Dick Tinto expressed quite another 
view from Scott's own when he said that "Description 
was to the author of a romance exactly what drawing 
and tinting were to a painter ; words were his colours, 



SCOTT 309 

and, if properly employed, they could not fail to 
place the scene, which he wished to conjure up, as 
effectually before the mind's eye as the tablet or canvas 
presents it to the bodily organ." All that Scott did 
was to set down the most vividly remembered points of 
a scene in the order in which his memory, when worked 
clear, presented them, trusting that readers with some 
knowledge of the same world would have something, 
according to their different powers and interests, to 
set their minds towards a scene as near it as possible. 
Moreover, he had greatly simplified the earth. He 
saw it as beautiful or sublime or tame, and if he loved 
a thing it had or came to have one of those qualities 
in a high degree. Thus, St. Mary's Lake had elements 
which at once endeared itself to him as a typical 
romantic water. He knew it well. In the introduc- 
tion to the second canto of " Marmion " he recalls it 
to a friend with whom he had hunted : 

" Up pathless Ettrick and on Yarrow, 
Where erst the outlaw drew his arrow. 
But not more blithe that silvan court, 
Than we have been at humbler sport ; 
Though small our pomp, and mean our game, 
Our mirth, dear Marriott, was the same. 
Remember'st thou my greyhounds true ? 
O'er holt or hill there never flew, 
From slip or leash there never sprang, 
More fleet of foot or sure of fang. 
Nor dull, between each merry chase, 
Pass'd by the intermitted space ; 
For we had fair resource in store. 
In classic and in Gothic lore : 
We mark'd each memorable scene. 
And held poetic talk between ; 
Nor hill nor brook we paced along, 
But had its legend or its song. ..." 



310 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

With the aid of memory, and of legend and song, 
he made St. Mary's Lake the model for a crystal lake 
where, 

" Abrupt and sheer, the mountains sink 
At once upon the level brink ; 
And just a trace of silver sand 
Marks where the water meets the land. . . ." 

But, as Andrew Lang pointed out, the water is peaty 
brown ; there is no sand, but a " white margin of dry 
stones, ordinary stones"; and "there are no moun- 
tains, nothing is * abrupt,' nothing is ' sheer ' ; green, 
grassy slopes descend placidly to the loch on one 
side, the other side is a plain, to which hills fall 
easily." He transmuted it as Jefferies did Coate 
Reservoir. He was not imitating or rivalling the 
works of Nature, but stamping his own image upon 
the offspring of a union between Nature and the 
Lady of the Lake — 

" Sole sitting on the shores of old romance.'' 

He had not the pedantry to look at hills with a 
yard-measure, and be obliged to condemn Hindhead 
because it is so much smaller than Ben Lomond. 
Thus, if his country is Scotland, it is no duplicate of 
that ancient kingdom. The two exist together sepa- 
rate, yet hardly independent of one another. Nor can 
their union cease to be fertile until there are no more 
heads, upon " the shores of old romance," where it can 
be celebrated afresh. 



R. L. STEVENSON 

STEVENSON'S country was Edinburgh and the 
Pentlands. He was born at Howard Place, 
Edinburgh; 17, Heriot Row became seven years later 
the home of the family, and for thirty years continued 
so. Edinburgh gave him his school and University. 
When he was seventeen, and for fourteen years after, 
his father rented Swanston Cottage, five miles away 
at the foot of the Pentlands ; and there and there- 
abouts, so long as he was in Scotland, he spent his 
best leisure thenceforward, reading, writing, and see- 
ing men and Nature. 

In early childhood, the suburbs of Edinburgh, as 
Mr. Graham Balfour has told us, gave substance to 
the words of the twenty-third Psalm, " ' the pastures 
green' being stubble-fields by the water of Leith, 
and * death's dark vale ' a certain archway in the 
Warriston Cemetery." The essay "A Penny Plain 
and Twopence Coloured " describes his pleasures at 
the age of six, when he had the company of his cousin, 
R. A. M. Stevenson, and of Skelt's Juvenile Drama, 
bought at a shop " which was dark and smelt of 
Bibles," and "was a loadstone rock for all that bore 
the name of boy." The cousins " lived together in a 
purely visionary state, and were never tired of 

311 



312 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

dressing up." When he was in Samoa, he could still 
hear the bugles at Edinburgh Castle, " those strains 
of martial music that she goes to bed with, ending 
each day, like an act of an opera, to the notes of 
bugles. ... It is the beautiful that I thus actively 
recall : the august airs of the Castle on its rock, 
nocturnal passages of lights and trees, the sudden 
song of the blackbird in a suburban lane, rosy and 
dusky winter sunsets, the uninhabited splendours of 
the early dawn, the building up of the city on a misty 
day, house above house, spire above spire, until it was 
received into a sky of softly glowing clouds, and seemed 
to pass on and upwards, fresh grades and rises, city 
beyond city, a new Jerusalem, bodily scaling heaven." 
In his letters of the seventies he shows how much his 
eye was turned on Edinburgh and the surrounding 
earth and air, and on his impression of them. They 
are in varying stages of execution, but never done 
without some thought of the morrow. Here is one, 
belonging to 1873 : 

'* I was wakened this morning by a long flourish of 
bugles and a roll upon the drums — the reveille at the 
Castle. I went to the window ; it was a grey, quiet 
dawn, a few people passed already up the street 
between the gardens, already I heard the noise of an 
early cab somewhere in the distance, most of the 
lamps had been extinguished but not all, and there 
were two or three lit windows in the opposite facade 
that showed where sick people and watchers had been 
awake all night and knew not yet of the new, cool 
day. This appeals to me with a special sadness : how 
often in the old times my nurse and I had looked 
across at these, and sympathized !" 



R. L. STEVENSON 3i3 

And another of a day's end : 

"Every now and then as we went, Arthur's Seat 
showed its head at the end of a street. Now to-day 
the blue sky and the sunshine were both entirely 
wintry ; and there was about the hill, in those 
glimpses, a sort of thin, unreal, crystalline distinct- 
ness that I have not often seen excelled. As the sun 
began to go down over the valley between the new 
town and the old, the evening grew resplendent ; all 
the gardens and low-lying buildings sank back and 
became almost invisible in a mist of wonderful sun, 
and the Castle stood up against the sky, as thin and 
sharp in outline as a castle cut out of paper. . . ." 

Day after day he had his eye on the object and on 
his writing-paper. 

But Stevenson's happiest early memories were of 
his grandfather Balfour's manse at Colinton, beyond 
the suburbs. He used to stay there often in bad 
health. 

" Out of my reminiscences of life in that dear 
place," said he, " all the morbid and painful elements 
have disappeared. That was my golden age : et 
ego in Arcadia vixi. There is something so fresh 
and wholesome about all that went on at Colinton, 
compared with what I recollect of the town, that 
I can hardly, even in my own mind, unite the two 
chains of reminiscences together ; they look like 
stories of two different people, ages apart in time 
and quite dissimilar in character." 

Manse and garden made an ample playground for 
his feet and his imagination. There he could meet 
cousins, witches, or antelopes, according to his need 
and mood, and always the silver hair and beautiful 



314 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

face of his grandfather. He has written of house 
and garden and people in *' The Manse " : 

"... A place in that time like no other : the garden 
cut into provinces by a great hedge of beech, and 
overlooked by the church and the terrace of the 
churchyard, where the tombstones were thick, and 
after nightfall ' spunkies ' might be seen to dance, at 
least by children ; flower-pots lying warm in sun- 
shine ; laurels and the great yew making elsewhere 
a pleasing horror of shade ; the smell of water rising 
from all round, with an added tang of paper-mills ; the 
sound of water everywhere, and the sound of mills — 
the wheel and the dam singing their alternate strain ; 
the birds on every bush and from every corner of the 
overhanging woods peahng out their notes until the 
air throbbed with them ; and in the midst of this 
the Manse. . . ." 

Other holidays in better health and in lively company 
he spent at Peebles and North Berwick. He and his 
cousin R. A. M. both rode, one a pony called " Hell," 
the other *' Purgatory." Above all, they " crusoed," 
" crusoeing " being " a word that covers all extempore 
eating in the open air : digging, perhaps, a house under 
the margin of the links, kindling a fire of the sea-ware 
and cooking apples there." The rest is written in 
" The Lantern Bearers." You see there the rocks, 
the grey islets, the "spit between two sandy bays," 
the " easterl}/ fisher-village " itself, and the '* endless 
links and sand-wreaths, a wilderness of hiding-holes, 
alive with popping rabbits and soaring gulls." Later 
on the sand-hills, the "promontory between two 
shallow bays," the islet, the rabbits and the gulls, 
reappear in " The Pavilion on the Links." 



R. L. STEVENSON 315 

When he had left school and was nearing eighteen, 
he spent July at Anstruther, August and part of Sep- 
tember at Wick, as he told his mother in letters, and 
the world in *' Random Memories." Those letters to 
his mother in 1868 were among his first exercises in 
precise description of this kind : 

" Wick lies at the end or elbow of an open triangular 
bay, hemmed on either side by shores, either cliff or 
steep earth-bank, of no great height. The grey houses 
of Pulteney extend along the southerly shore almost 
to the cape ; and it is about halfway down this shore 
— no, six-sevenths way down — that the new break- 
water extends athwart the way." 

You see him studying the storm, watching to see 
if it would throw the big stones at the wall, and then 
remarking that to appreciate a storm " requires a little 
of the artistic temperament of which Mr. T. S., C.E. 
[his father] possesses some, whatever he may say." 
He concludes that he cannot look at the storm prac- 
tically — that is, as an engineer. 

Two years later he was at the Isle of Earraid, off the 
coast of Mull. The people on the ship and the scenery 
of the shore were a whole, said he, that "would have 
made a novelist's fortune"; and he was himself twice 
in later years to make use of the isle. It was the 
scene of David Balfour's shipwreck in "Kidnapped." 
It had the essay, " Memoirs of an Islet," to itself. At 
the beginning of that essay he tells us what we should 
otherwise have had to discover for ourselves, how he 
treated his experience. 

"Those who try to be artists," he says, "use, time 
after time, the matter of their recollections, setting 



3i6 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

and resetting little colouried memories of men and 
scenes, rigging up (it may be) some especial friend 
in the attire of a buccaneer, and decreeing armies to 
manoeuvre, or murder to be done, on the playground 
of their youth." 

He speaks of memories being "pleasant spectres" 
which can be " laid " by use in a book : 

" I used one but the other day : a little eyot of 
dense, freshwater sand, where I once waded deep in 
butterburs, delighting to hear the song of the river 
on both sides, and to tell myself that I was indeed and 
at last upon an island. Two of my puppets lay there 
a summer's day, hearkening to the shearers at work 
in riverside fields and to the drums of the grey old 
garrison upon the neighbouring hill. And this was, 
I think, done rightly : the place was rightly peopled — 
and now belongs not to me, but to my puppets — for 
a time at least " 

There is, he continues, another island in his " col- 
lection," the memory of which besieges him : 

" I put a whole family there in one of my tales, 
and later on threw upon its shores, and condemned 
to several days of rain and shellfish on its tumbled 
boulders, the hero of another. The ink is not yet 
faded ; the sound of the sentences is still in my mind's 
ear ; and I am under a spell to write of that island 
again." 

This was Earraid. 

But by that time, since May, 1867, Stevenson's head- 
quarters were at Swanston. This also, after his manner, 
he used three times in writing : first in letters ; second 
in "Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh"; lastly in "St. 
Ives." It is on the main slope of the Pentlands : 



R. L. STEVENSON 317 

" A bouquet of old trees stands round a white farm- 
house, and from a neighbouring dell you can see smoke 
rising and leaves rustling in the breeze. Straight above, 
the hills climb a thousand feet into the air. The neigh- 
bourhood, about the time of lambs, is clamorous with 
the bleating of flocks ; and you will be awakened in 
the grey of early summer mornings by the barking 
of a dog, or the voice of a shepherd shouting to the 
echoes. ..." 

They were six hundred feet above the sea in a 
climate that had done little towards clothing the 
garden by May. 

Here Stevenson may be seen at work and play, 
intermingled, writing long letters ; talking to John 
Todd, ** the oldest herd on the Pentlands," or Robert 
Young, the old Scotch gardener, or the military beggar 
who asseverated that Keats was a fine poet ; walking, 
skating, fishing, canoeing, reading behind the yew- 
hedge. While he was at work on "John Knox" he 
was describing a storm and his sensations at Swan- 
ston : 

"... But the quaking was not what put me about ; 
it was the horrible howl of the wind round the corner ; 
the audible haunting of an incarnate anger about the 
house ; the evil spirit that was abroad ; and, above all, 
the shuddering silent pauses when the storm's heart 
stands dreadfully still for a moment. O how I hate 
a storm at night ! They have been a great influence 
in my life, I am sure ; for I can remember them so far 
back — long before I was six at least. . . ." 

Nor was night only solemn. It was, he said, " very 
solemn to see the top of one hill steadfastly regarding 
you over the shoulder of another"; he "never before 



3i8 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 

to-daj'' fully realized the haunting of such a gigantic 
face, as it peers over into a valley and seems to com- 
mand all corners." 

This was written when Stevenson was twenty- 
three. But at the end of the year — 1873 — he was 
ordered South, and did not revisit Swanston till the 
following May. His wanderings had begun. He was 
much in London or Paris. He yachted on the west 
coast of Scotland ; he canoed through Belgium. He 
walked in England and in France. He returned to 
Edinburgh and .Swanston for visits of a few months, 
sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. Henley 
and he finished " Deacon Brodie " there. But travel 
had schooled him to write where he found himself, at 
Swanston, at Pitlochry, at Braemar, at Kingussie. He 
became something of an epicure in scenery by the 
time he had crossed America and settled in Bourne- 
mouth ; and, what with the refining influences of his 
style on whatsoever it touched, it can hardly be 
said that he had a country, except that he knew best 
and remembered most affectionately Edinburgh and 
Swanston, and that as subjects they are more con- 
spicuous in his writing than other places. When to 
go himself was impossible, he asked his nurse to 
sprinkle the turf of Halkerside, above Swanston, with 
water from the spring where he used to " sit and make 
bad verses." It was " Ille Terrarum " of the poem in 
" Underwoods": 

" An' there the auld housie beeks an' dozes, 
A' by her lane." 



INDEX 



Abbotsford, 251, 307 

Aberfeldy, 293 

Aberystwyth, 59 

Abingdon, Earl of, 102, 103 

Acle, 245 

Acton, 119 

Adderbury, 75 

Adders, 196, 244 

Albury, 42 

Aldbourne, 138 

Aide, River, 219 

Aldeburgh, 212, 216, 217, 218, 222, 

223, 237, 240 
Ale, 157, 241 

Alfoxden, 182, 184, 274, 276, 277 
Alfred, King, 15 
Allan Bank, 274, 281 
Allen, T., 93 

Alloway, Kirk, 36, 291, 292 
Alresford, 197 
Amberley, 160 
Ambleside, 275 

America, 74, 126, 179, 191, 197,318 
Amesbury, 85, gg, 246 
Andover, 129 
Angel Gabriel, the, 94 
Anne, Queen, gg 
Anstruther, 315 
Arnold, Matthew, 68 81 
Arnold, Dr. Thomas, 69, 275 
Arran, 292 

Arun, River, 157, 160 
Ascot, 251 
Ash, 125 

Ashby Castle, 241 
Ashestiel, 303, 306, 307 
Aston Clinton, 72 
Aubrty, John, 91-103 
Austen, Lady, 204 
Avebury, 85, 97, 98, 102 
Avon, River, 124 
Ayr, 291, 292, 293 



Baden, Andrew, 138 

Bailey, Benjamin, 33 

Balfour, Graham, 311 

Ballads, 300 

Bandon, 126 

Bannockburn, 302 

Barbauld, A. L., 181 

Barnstaple, 62 

Barrington, Daines, in 

Barton, Bernard, 26, 236, 238 

Barton Fell, 280 

Basingstoke, 105 

Basire, James, 8 

Bassenthwaite, 59 

Bath, 97, 148, 198, 199, 238, 266, 

273 
Battersea, 8 

Battie, Catherine, iio-iii 
Beachy Head, 141 
Beaumont, Sir G., 274 
Becket Park, loi 
Bedfordshire, 106 
Bedhampton, 37 
Belfast, 251 
Belgravia, 264 
Belloc, Hilaire, 155-160 
Belvoir. See Castle 
Bemerton, 93 
Bere, 95 

Berkhampstead, Great, 203 
Berkshire, 55, 63, loi 
Bermondsey, 142 
Berwick, 251 
Berwick, North, 314 
Bible, 6 

Birdlip Hill, 123 
Bisham, 65 
Bishopgate, 64 
Bishop's Cannings, 94, 99 
Bishopston, 138 
Bishop's Waltham, 108, 119 
Blackmoor Vale. 145. 148 



319 



320 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 



Blair's " Grave," 14 

Blake, Catherine, 8, 9, 12, 15 

Blake, James, 9 

Blake, Robert, 9 

Blake, William, 3-17. See London 

Blakesware, 20, 21, 22, 26, 29 

Blandford, 92, 93, 35 

Bloomfield, Robert, 198 

Bluestockings, 9 

Bockhampton, Higher, 145 

Bognor, 251 

Bonchurch, 264 

Bookham, 73 

Border, the, 307 

' ' Border, Minstrelsy of the, ' ' 303 

Borrow, George, 126, 244-253 

Borrowdale, 187, 188, 244 

Boston (U.S. A), 126 

Bosworth, 92 

Botany, 71, 214, 216, 222 

Botley, 108, 119, 120, 124 

Boulge, 236, 238, 240 

Bourn, River, 124 

Bournemouth, 148, 257, 318 

Bowles, W. L., 178 

Box Hill, 34, 41, 43, 70 

Boxley, 257 

Bracknell, 63, 64 

Braemar, 318 

Bratha Head, 187 

Brawne, Fanny, 38, 39 

Brecon, 45, 97 

Bredfield, 236 

Bridgwater, 127, 180, i8i 

Brighton, 135, 141, 257 

Bristol, 127, 146, 179, 180, iSi, 189, 

273,274,277 
Bristol Channel, 183 
Broad Chalk, 95, 96, 99, loi, 102 
Broad Hinton, 94, 138 
Brockley Coomb, 181 
Brompton, West, 250, 252 
Bronte, Charlotte, 69, 283 et seq. 
Bronte, Emily, 283-8S 
Brooke, Rupert, 241 
Brown, C. A., ^5, ^ 
Browne, Thomas, 93 
Browne, William, 177 
Bruton, 21 
Bryony, 66 
Bubb Down, 146 
Buckfastleigh, 168 
Buckinghamshire, 55, 203 
Builth, 277 



Bulbarrow, 146 

Bungay, 69, 215 

Burderop, 137, 138, 139 

Burford Bridge, 34, 42 

Burghclere, 120 

Burghley, 225-228 

Burke, Edmund, 216 

Burne-Jones, 82 

Burnet, 99 

Burns, Gilbert, 291 

Burns, Robert, 35, 36, 231, 291-97 

Bushell, T., 94 

Buttermere, 71 

Button, Sir William, 98, 102 

Butts, Thomas, 13 

Byron, 51, 65, 252, 287 

Carnarvon, 187 

Carnarvonshire, 62 

Callender, 308 

Calne, 134, 137, 138, 139 

Camberwell, 5 

Cambridge, 22, 68, 163, 174, 241, 

256, 257, 273. See also Colleges 
" Camilla," 127 
Canterbury, 33, 244 
Capheaton, 264, 265 
Carlyle, Thomas, 237, 238, 240 
Carpenter, Charlotte M., 304 
Casterton, 225 
" Castle of Indolence, " Thomson's, 

278 
Castle, Belvoir, 217, 218 
Castle, Dunottar, 304 
Castle, Goodrich, 70, 276 
Castle, Hermitage, 303 
Castle, Roxburgh, 301 
Cattistock, 154 
Cattle, lowing of, 195 
Celtic, 248, 282 
Chalk Bourne, the, 103 
Chalk hills, 85, 123. See Downs 
Channel, English, 153 
Chapone, Hester, 106. See Mulso 
Chard, 152 
Charles I., 168 
Charles II., 98, 104 
Chaucer, 95, 241 
Chelsea, 41, 43, 238 
Chepstow, 70, 198 
Chertsey, 41 
Cherwell, 58, 68 
Chesham, 123 
Cheshunt, 27 



INDEX 



321 



Chessington, 140 

Chesterton (Cambs.), 242 

Chichester, 14, 37 

Children, 7, 8. 57. 58. 85, 95, no, 
112, 117, 119, 131, 175-78, 214-15, 
227 et seq., 247, 251, 263-64, 298- 

99, 300. 311, 313, 314. 317 
Chippenham, 94 
Chiseldon, 133 
Chitterne, 99 
Christian Malford, 103 
Christ's Hospital, 19, 177, 178 
Churchley, 28 
Cirencester, 99 
Clairmont, Claire, 65 
Clapham Common, 58 
Clare, John, 224-235 
Ciai'endon, 129 
Clark, Andrew, 102 
Clarke, Cowden, 27, 30 
Claygate, 140 
Clerkenwell, 31 
Clevedon, 180 
Cley Hill, 100 
Clifton, 179 
Clonmel, 244 
Clough, A. H., 76 
Clover, 84 

Coate, 135, 136, 138, 143, 310 
Cobbett, George, 1 17 
Cobbett, Richard, 121 
Cobbett, William, 108, 114, 117-125, 

157, 195 
Cobham, 71, 72 
Cockermouth, 273 
Cockney, 87-8 
Coleorton, 274-75 
Coleridge, Hartley, 128, 177, 275 
Coleridge, S. T., 19, 22, 23, 29, 60, 

70, 127, 128, 231, 274, 276, 278, 

280, 305 
Colinton, 313 
College, Balliol, 179 
College, Jesus (Camb.), 179, 243 
College, Magdalen, 104 
College, Oriel, 105, 107, log 
College, St. John's (Camb.), 163, 

242. 243, 273 
College, Trinity (Camb.), 241, 242 
Colney Hi; ch, 27 
Colvin, Sir S. C, 39 
Compton, 104 
Condowell, 59 
Con/esaions, Rousseau's, 128, 130 

21 



Coniston, 275 

Connemara, 251 

Constable, John, 239 

Copsham, 43 

Cornwall, 126, 173, 195, 196, 244, 

250, 252, 257 
Country life, 40, 52, 72, 165 et seq., 

207, 299, 303 
Covent Garden, 20, 44 
Cowdray Park, 251 
Co well, E. B, 236 
Cowper, William, 10, 203-211,, 

294 
Cowper's Green, 233 
Crabbe, George, 212, 223 
Crabbe, George (junior), 236, 237 
Craighall, 304 
Crew, Sir C, 171 
Crewkerne, 152, 274 
Cromarty, 35 

Cromwell, Oliver, 102, 138 
Crooksbury Hill, 117 
Crowborough, 135, 142 
Crowe, Eyre, 41 
Cruikshank, George, 81 
Crammock, 70 
Crystal Palace, 43 
Cumberland, 55, 273^ 
Cumner, 76, 77 
Curfew, 130 
Cwm Elan, 58, 61 

Daffodils, 170, 279 

Dalkeith, 308 

Dante, 16 

Dan vers, T., 93, 102 

Dart, River, 168 

Dartmoor, 168, 174 

Davenant, E. , loi 

Dean Bourn, 171 

Dean, East, 264 

Dean Prior, 163, 164, 167, 168, 173, 

174 
Deane, West, 108 
Deben, River, 240 
Deeping Fen, 224 
Deeping, Great. 225 
Deeping, Market, 225, 226 
Delattre, M., 164 
De Quincey, T , 274, 275 
Derbyshire, 195 
Derwent, River, 276 
Derwentwater, 59 
Devi::es, 92, 134, 137 



322 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 



Devonshire, 35, 55, 62, 64, 73, 91, 

97, 106, 163, 164, 167, 172, 175, 

177, 292 
Dials, 129, 241 
Ditchling Beacon, 141 
Dogs, 73, 96. 119. 138, 247, 275 
Doon, River, 292 
Dorchester, 145, 153 
Dorchester, Upper (U.S.A.), 126 
Dorking, 42, 44, 70 
Dorset, 39, 92-95. 151, 195, 274 
Dorset Archagoiogical Society, 145 
Dove Cottage, 187, 274, 275, 278, 

281 
Dovedale, 273 
Downs, 47, 96, 97, 98, 108, 112, 141, 

145) 155' 160, 192, 194, 266. See 

also Epsom 
Downton, loi 

Draycot Cerne, 93, 99, 98, 103 
Draycot Foliat, 136 
Drayton, Michael, 254, 298 
Druid, 3, 43, 208 
Drury Lane, 23 
Dryden, J., 112 
Dublin, 251 
Duff, M. E. Grant, 71 
Dulwich, 5, 6 
Dumfries, 36 
Dumfriesshire, 291 
Dunmail Raise, 80, 275 
Dunottar. See Castle 
Dunwich, 237, 240, 268, 269 
Durham, 277 
Durley, 108, 119 
Dyer, G., 25 

Earraid, 315, 316 

Earth, 51, 52, 192, 194 

Easebourne, 257 

Easedale, 278, 281 

East Anglia, 158, 236, 237 

Easton, 124 

Easton Pierce, 93, 94, 95, 96, 103 

Ecciefecban, 251 

Edinburgh, 59, 63, 128, 244, 247, 

251, 292, 298, 300, 302, 304, 305, 

307, 311, 312,318 
Edmonton, 28, 29, 30 
Effingham, 73 
Ellesmere, Lady, 74 
Elliot, William, 303 
EUisland, 291 
Eltham, 141, 142 



Emont, River, 273 
Enfield, 26, 27, 28 
England, Blake's, 7, 17 
England, Merry, 19 
" England, This is," 251 
Enston, 94 
Epping. See Forest 
Epsom Downs, 23 
Ericolevis NeapoUtana, gi 
Esher, 41 
Esk, River, 304 
Essex, 82, 106, 238 
Eton, 55. 56, 57, 58, 64, 265 
Ettrick, 275, 335, 306, 309 
Evans, Mary, 178 
Evelyn, John, 44 
Everley, 120, 121 
Exeter, 152, 168 
Exeter, Marquis of, 225 
Exminster, 73 
Exmoor, 140 
Eynsham, 68 

Falconbridge, Thomas, 166 

Falkirk, 292 

Faringdon (Berks), 84 

Faringdon (Hants), 109 

Farnham, 117, 118, 119, 124, 125 

Felpham, 10, 11, 13, 14 

Feriby, George, 99 

Festiniog, 259 

Fishing, 41, 70, 82, 87, 103, 250, 

302, 317 
FitzGerald, Edward, 236-43, 254, 

259 
Flat Holm, 180 
Flaxman, John, 8, 10, 11, 13 
Flaxman, Maria, 10 
Fledborough, 69 
Fleet Street, 23, 38, 113, 136, i 
Fleurs, 301 
Flodden, 303 
Folk Songs, 8, 294 
Forest Cross, 28 
Forest, Epping, 76, 82, 257 
Forest of Dean, 258 
Forest, St. Leonard's, 55 
Forest, Savernake, 82, 137 
Forest, Windsor, 64 
Forfarshire, 304 
Forty Hill, 28 
Fosse Way, 99 
Fox How, 69, 275 
Framlingham, 237 



INDEX 



323 



Fricker, Sarah, 179 
Fritillary, 75 
Froude, J. A., 240 
Fuseli, g 

Gaelic, 245 
Galloway, 313 

Gardens, 76, 77, 78, 79, 107, 208, 
209, 227, 237, 254, 256, 261, 

314 

Gaskell, Mrs., 283 

Gauntlet Pipes. See Tobacco 

Gerald of Wales, 158 

German Ocean. See North Sea 

Giant's Causeway, 251 

Gibraltar, iii 

Gilchrist, A., 3, 5, 14 

Giles, Sir E., 168 

Gillingham, 100 

Gilpin, Mrs. John, 28 

Gilsland, 304, 308 

Gladman, 21 

Glamorgan, 97 

Glaramara, 304 

Glasgow, 251 

Glemham, Great, 217, 218 

Glinton, 224, 228 

Gloucester, 92, 123, 127 

Gloucester Hall, 94 

Gloucestershire, 64, 92, 136 

Godalming, 43 

Goddards, 137 

Godwin, Mary, 63 

Godwin, William, 9, 62, 128 

Goethe, 252 

Gordon, Lady Mary, 264 

Gough, Richard, 8 

Gowbarrow, 279 

Grant, John, loi 

Grantchester, 70, 241 

Grasmere, 6g, 274, 278, 280, 281 

Great Ridge Wood, loi 

Great Russell Street, 24, 67, 248 

Great Western Railway, 137 

Greenhouses, 208, 209 

Greta, River, 175, 187 

Greta Hall, 186, 187, 188, 278 

Grey Wethers, 97, 98 

Groome, Archdeacon, 236 

Gr.'/ome, F. Hindes, 250 

Gryidale Pike, 188 

Guildford, 42, 104 

Gumber Corner, 158, 160 

Gyde, 136 



Gypsies, 75, 193, 196, 224, 228, 245, 
251 

Hake, A. Egmont, 252 

Hake, Gordon, 251 

Halifax, 285 

Halkerside, 318 

Hamble, River, 115 

Hambledon Hill, 146 

Hammersmith, 82, 83 

Hampshire, 37, 40, 47, 104, 109, 113, 

118, 123, 124, 193, 194, 196, 197. 

251, 262 
Hampstead, 4, 15, 16, 31, 33. 34, 35. 

37- 38, 41 
Hardman, William, 41, 42 
Hardy, Thomas, 144-154 
Harrow, 71 
Harrow Way, 118 
Harting, East, 104 
Haslemere, 43 
Hawkshead, 273, 275 
Haworth, 283, 285 
Haydon, B. R., 24, 84 
Hayley, William, 10 
HazHtt, 23, 33, 126-133, 181 
Hearne, Sam, 277 
Heath, Bexley, 82, 85 
Heath, Household, 245, 252 
Heaths, 33, 205, 234 
" Hebrides," j hnson's, 112 
Helm Crag, 281 
Helpston, 224, 226, 230 
Helvellyn, 18, 59, 280, 304 
Henley, W. E 318 
Herbert, Lord dward, 102 
Herbert, George, 93 
Herbert, Magdalen, 102 
Herbert, Lord Pembroke, 100 
Hereford, 92 
Herefordshire, 97, 121 
Hermitage Castle. See Castle 
Herrick, Elizabeth, 174 
Herrick, Nicholas, 163 
Herrick, Robert, 163 174 
Herrick, Thomas, 165 
Plertfordshire, 19, 20, 21, 24, 29, 

122, 203 
Hesiod, 98 

Hesketh, Lady, 204, 207, 209 
" Hester," Lamb's, 213 
Hexham, 303 
Heytesbury, 124] 
Highgate, 189 



324 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 



Highlands, 278, 295, 300, 308 

High Stoy, 146 

Highworth, 124, 137 

Hindhead, 43, 310 

Hindon, loi 

Hinksey, 77 

Hitchener, Elizabeth, 59, 60, 61, 

62 
Hobbes, Thomas, go, 95 
Hogg, James, 305 
Hogg.T. J..58, 59, 63, 67 
Hog's Back, 43 
Hogsmill River, 140 
Holcroft, 9 
Holford. 277 
Holt, Anne, 104 
Holt- White, R., 109 
Hook, 140 
Horace, 112 
Horncastle, 246, 247 
Hornet, 197 
Horsham, 55, 56 
Hospitals, St. Thomas's and Guy's, 

30. 32 
Huddersfield 244 
Hudson, W. H., ^15, 157, 190-99 
Hughes, T., 75 
Hugo, Victor, 267 
Huguenot's, 244 
Humming-bird hawk-moth, 194- 

196 
Hunt, Leigh, 31, 32, 34, 37 
Hunting, gg, 102, 103, 117, 119, 

121, 122, 138, 307, 309 
Huntingdon, 204 
Huntingdonshire, 244 
Hutchinson, Mary, 274 
Hyde Park, 78 
Hynd, Rev. Mr., 92 
Hythe, 244 

Ikling Way, 153 

India House, 26 

Indoor mind, 194 

Insects, ig6-g7 

Ipswich, 236 

Ireland, 35, 60, 62, 247, 248, 250, 

257 
Irthing Flood, 187 
Irvine, 291 
Isis, River, 58 
Islands, 55, 65, 121, 180, 248, 250, 

315, 316. See also Man, Wight 
Isleworth, 55, 56, 57 



Islington, 5, 25 
Itchen, 124, 194, ig7 

James I., gg 

Jefferies, the name, 135 

Jefferies, John, 136 

Jefferies, Richard (the author), 134- 

143. 155. 192, 195. 212, 232, 310 
Jefieries, Richard (the elder), 136 
Johnson, John, 9, 204 
Johnson, Samuel, 9 
Jones, Inigo, 241 
Jonson, Ben, 163 
Joyce, Mary, 228 

Katrine, Loch, 304, 305 

Keats, George, 32 

Keats, John, 24, 30-39, 67, 291, 292, 

317 
Kelmscott, 82, 83, 84, 85 
Kelso, 301, 303 
Kennet, River, 98 
Kensington, 120 
Kensington Gardens, 78, 79 
Kent, 40, 82, 106, ig5, 196, 262 
Keswick, 19, 59, 60, 80 
Kew, 118 
Killarney, 62, 259 
Kilmington, 99, 100, loi 
Kington St. Michael, 92, 94, 96, 103 
Kingston-on Thames, 43, 251 
Kingussie, 318 
Kii-kcudbright, 36 
Kite. 206, 219, 235 
Knapp, W. I., 244 
Knoll Hill, 99, 100 
Knoyle, East, loi 
Knorren Moor, 187 

La Bruyere, 206 

Lady of the Lake, 259, 310 

Laidlaw, William, 305 

Lake Country, 80, 273 et seq., 304 

Lake Poets, 18 

Laleham, 69, 75 

Lamb, Charles, 18-29, 128, 178, 

182, i88, 226, 231 
Lamb, Mary, 22, 28, 67, 128, 188 
Lambeth, 9, 10 
Lambourn, 137 
Lancaster, 35 

Landscape, love of, 159, 301 
Land's End, 196, 250 
Lang, Andrew, 244 



INDEX 



325 



Langdale Pike, 187 

Langford, Little, loi 

La Plata, 191 

Lasswade, 274, 304, 305 

Lavant, 12 

Lavendon. 207 

Lavengro, 204 

Lavington, West, 102 

Leatherhead, 42 

Lechlade, 64, 136 

Leicester, 163 

Leicestershire, 217, 274 

Leigh Delamere, 92, 95 

Leith Hill, 70, 71 

Leland, C. G., 251 

Liddington, 135, 140 

Lincolnshire, 19, 192, 217, 254, 256, 

257 

Lind, Dr., 57 

Linnell, 15 

Liskeard, 250 

Liverpool, 257 

Llandilo, 45 

Llandrindod, 45 

Llanelly, 45 

Llangollen, 127 

Llanrechid, 97 

Lochlie, 291 

Lockhart, J. G., 29S, 303 

Lomond, Ben, 310 

London : Blake on, 4-5, 16 ; Clare 
on, 230 ; Fitzgerald on, 23S ; 
Hazlitt on, 132 ; Herrick on, 
164, 172 ; Keats on, 31 ; Lamb on, 
iS, 19, 29 ; Meredith on, 40 

London, Fire of, 91 

Londoners, 16, 19, 23, 26, 29, 40, 
87, 88, 142, 164, 171 

London Magazine, 25 

London public, 143 

London. See also Strand, Fleet 
Street, Temple, Great Russell 
Street, Chelsea, British Museum, 
Tower, West End, Hyde Park 

Long (of Draycot Cerne), 94, 98, 
102, 103 

Long Island, 121 

Lowell, J. R., 240 

Lowes'oft, 237, 240 

Lowlands, 291, 292, 30S 

Lowman, Bridget, 174 

Lucas, E. V,, 21 

Ludgershall, 120 

Lulworth, 39 



Lymington, 204 

Lyndon, 109 

Lj-nmouth, 62 

Lynton, 127, 181, 184, 115, 276 

McCarth}', J.. 51 

Mackail, J. W. , 83, 87 

Mackery End, 21, 25, 29 

Maiden Bradley, 99 

Maidstone, 126, 257, 258 

Maitland, F. W., 45 

Malette, Sir T., 91 

Malmesbury, 94, 137 

Man, Isle of, 248, 250 

Manchester, 257 

Manning, T., 23, 24 

Manorbier, 138 

March, 157 

March Hall, 28 

Margate, 30, 31, 33 

Marlborough, 82, 85, 97, 98, 99, 

134, 136, 137, 138 
Marlow, 64, 65, 66 
Marnhull, 149 
Marshes, 222, 267 
Martin, H., loi 
Martineau, Harriet, 69 
Mathew, G. Felton, 31 
Mathew, Mrs., 9 
May Day, 164-65 
Melksham, 97 
Melrose, 251 
Menteith, 308 
Mere, 100 

Meredith, George, 40-52 
Meredith, W. M., 44 
Merivale, H., 70 
Merrow Down, 42 
Merton, 237 
Mickleham, 42, 43 
Middlemarsh, 146, 147 
Middlesex, 41, 88 
Midlands, 159 
Milford (Surrey), 43 
Milkmaids, 95, 29S, 299 
Miller, P., 107, 108 
Milton (Wilts), 124 
Milton, John, 6, 12S 
Minehead, 127 
Monastery, 97 
Monmouthshire, 195 
Montacute, 146 
Moors, 2S4, 285, 286 
Morehouse, Lancelot, loi 



326 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 



Moreton Binkey, 109 

Morley, John, 43, 44 

Morning Post, 41 

Morris, May, 83, 84 

Morris, William, 43, 82-88 

Morison, Cotter, 43 

Morton, Cardinal, 94 

Mossgiel, 291 

Mountains, 55, 61, 69, So, 275-78, 

285, 286, 295 
Moxon, E„ 28 
Mull, 315 
Mulready, 15 
Mulso, Hester, 106, 109 
Mulso, John, 105, 107, 109, 114 
Mumber Lane, 246 
Mumper's Dingle, 246 
Museum, British, 26, 142, 143 
Muston, 217, 223 
Myers, F. W. H., 2S0 

Nab Cottage, 275 

Names, fictitious, 144, 145, 147, 

151, 246 
Names, place-, 149, 150, 151, 232 
Names, Wiltshire, 136 
Nant Gwillt, 61, 63 
Naooleon, 152 
Naiuralists, 139, 193 
Nature and j^outh, 131. See also 

Children 
Naule, 103 
Nene, River, 241 
Netley, 204 
Neuwied, 41 
Newcastle, (38 
New Forest, 151, 196, 197, 251, 

257. 258 
Newgate, 178 
Newington, 19, 25, 29 
Newington Butts, 5 
Newlands Corner, 42 
Newport Pagnell, 209 
New River, 19, 25, 179 
Newton Valence, 108, 112 
Nith, River, 294 
Noar Hill, iii 
No Man's Land, 160 
Norfolk, 126, 195, 204, 24^) 
Norman Cross, 244 
Northampton, 224 
Northamptonshire, 106, 224, 235, 

241 
Northaw, 27 



North Country, 187, 265 
Northolt, 71 

North Sea, 212, 238, 256 
Northumberland, 264, 265 
Norwich, 245, 246, 247, 248, 252, 

253 
Note-books, 137, 139, 140, 1S8, 252, 

268 
"Nouvelle Heloise, La," 128 
Number 666, interpretation of, 100, 

lOI 

Oakhanger, 104 

Ochils, 295 

Olney, 203-205, 208, 241 

Opium, 189, 214 

Orchis, Bee, 71 

Orcop, 122 

" Orinda, The Matchless," 33 

Ossian, 252, 292 

Otter, River, 176, 177 

Ottery St. Mary, 71, 175, 177, 179, 

181 
Oulton, 249, 251, 252 
Ouse, River, 203, 205, 208 
Oxford, 24, 33, 34, 55, 58, 68, 69, 

75, 77, 82, 84, 85, 94, 103, 104. 

105, 107, 109, 114, 179, 241, 242, 

265. See also Colleges 
Oxfordshire, 88, 94, 104, 106 
Oxshott, 41 
Oxwich, 71 

Paine, Tom, 9 

Pain's Hill, 74 

Painswick, 136 

Palmer, 3, 15 

Pampas, 191, 194 

Parham, Great, 216, 217 

Parks, 261 62 

Parnassus, 222 

Passion flower, 261 

Patagonia, 191 

Patriotism, 186, 187 

" Paul and Virginia," 127 

Peacock, T. L., 41, 64, 65, 67 

Peasant, 229, 231, 291, 293, 296 

Peckham Rye, 5 

Peebles, 314 

Pembroke, 15S 

Pennant, T., iii 

Penrith, 273, 274, 304 

Pentlands, 311, 317 

Pentonhook, 75 

Perfumes, 171 



INDEX 



327 



Perth, 187 

Perthshire, 304, 305, 30S 
Pertwood, 96, loi 
Peterborough, 224, 225 
Petersfield, 120 
Pett, 244 
Petworth, 14 
Pevensey, 141 
Pewsey, 124 
Phillips, Ambrose, 14 
Pilgrims' Way, 158 
Pitlochry, 318 
Plato, 241 

Plymouth, 14S, 168, 250 
" Polyolbion," 254 
Poole, T., 181, 182 
Porlock, 185 
Portland, 148 
Portsdown, 118 
Portsmouth, 41, 42, 72 
Potter, Francis, 100 
Poulshot, loi 
Prestonpans, 302 
Priestley, Dr., 9 
Provinces, 159 
Puddletown, 144, 145, 148 
Pulteney, 315 
Puritanism, 50, 102 
Putney, 265 

Quantocks, iSi, 182, 184, 188, 274, 

277 
Quantoxhead, 183 

Racedown, 181, 182, 274, 275 
Radcliffe, Anne, 56 
Radnorshire 58 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, gi, 93, 94, loi 
Rambling, 22, 59, 1S5, 196, 198, 293, 

307 
Ramsay, Allan, 300 
Ranmore, 44 
Ray, John, 108 
Reading, 179 
Red Horn Hill, 97 
•' Religio Medici," 96 
Rendham, 217, 219, 223 
Revolution, French, 4, 61, 210 
Reynolds, J. H., 35 
Rhayaoer, 58, 61 
Rice, James, 37 
Richard HI., 92 
Richmond-on-Thames, 276 
Richmond Park, 251 



Riding, 123, 250, 265, 293, 302, 307, 

314 
Ringmer, no, 113 
Ritchie, David, 304 
Robinson, H. Crabb, 26 
Rodbourn, 136 
Roehampton, 251 
Romance, 301, 310 
Rooks, 206 
Roslin, 305 

Rossetti, D., 9, 13, 82, 28S 
Rother, River, 160 
Rotherfield, 141 
Rothschilds, 72 
Roxburgh Castle. See Castles 
Royal Society, 100 
Rugby, 69. 80 
Ruskin, John, 160, 255 
Rutland, 109, 158, 225 
Rydal, 274, 275, 2S1 

St. Burian, 173 

St. Catherine's Hill. 38 

St. Cleers, 250 

St. Edmunds, Bury, 216, 236 

St. George's Hill, 42, 72 

St. Ives, ig6 

St. Mary's Lake, 305, 309, 310 

St. Thomas, Cricket, 152 

Salisbury, 99, 100, 129 

Salisbury Plain, 85, 95, 129, 192, 

248, 273, 276 
" Salutation and Cat," 22, 179 
Samoa, 312 
Sampson, John, g, 13 
Sandford, 68 
Sark, 267 
Sarum, 93, 97 

Scholar gipsy enthusiasts, 193 
Scotland, 248, 250, 251, 274, 278, 

282, 291, 298 etseq., 310, 31S 
Scott, Sir Walter, 35, 132, 274, 298- 

310 
Scott, Sir Gilbert, S3 
Sea, II, 12, 156, 220, 239, 263, 264, 

267, 269, 315 
Seaford, 41 

" Seasons," Thomson's, 105, 225 
Seend, 97, 101 
Selborne, 104 et seq. 
" Selborne, Natural History of," 

142 
Selkirk 305 
Selkirkshire, 304 



328 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 



Seneca, 112 

Severn, River, 90, 274 

Shaftesbury, 148, 149 

Shakespeare, 6, 34, 51, 256, 30J 

Sharp, J. C, 76 

Shelley, Mary, 65 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 55-67, 214, 

226, 263 
Shenstone, 300 
Sherborne, 149 
Shere, 42 

Sherren, Wilkinson, 149 
Ships, 118, 142, 156 
Shotover, 58 
Shrivenham, loi 
Shropshire, 126, 128, 246 
Shurton Bars, 180 
Sidney, Mary, loi 
Sidney, Sir Philip, 92, 93, loi, 127 
Sittingbourne, 124 
Skiddaw, 18 35, 59, 188 
Slaughden Quay, 212, 222 
Smith, J. T., 84 
Snell, Sir C, 94 
Snooke, Mrs., 113 
Soham, Monk, 236 
Solitude, 130, 206 
Somersby, 255 
Somerset, 94, 180, 181, 184, 1S5, 

192, 198 
Southampton, 32, 119, 148, 204, 205 
South country, 159 
Southey, 20, 60, 179, 275 
Southgate, 27 
Spedding, James, 236 
Spenser, Edmund, 30, 301 
Spithead, 118 
Staffa, 35, 36 
Staffordshire, 246 
Stamford, 224 
Stephen, Leslie, 44, 45, 47 
Stevenson, R. A. M., 311, 314 
Stevenson, R. L,, 43, 44, 311-318 
Stevenson, Thomas, 315 
Stirling, 292, 302, 305 
Stockbridge, 129 
Stoddart, John, 305 
Stoddart, Sarah, 128 
Stonehenge, 3, 95, 98, 129 
Stothard, Thomas, S 
Stourhead, 146 
Stourton, 100 
Stowey, Nether, 127, 181, 182, 185, 

i8g, 274, 277 , 



Stowey, Upper, 183 

Stowmarket, 215 

Strand, the, 15, 164 

Strands, 70 

Stratford-on-Avon, 33, 63, 187 

Stroud, 136 

Stuart, Mary, 265 

Sturminster Newton, 145, 146 

Surbiton, 133, 140 

Surrey, 40, 41, 47, 49, 74, 106, iiS, 

133, 140, 143, 262 
Sussex, 13, 37, 40, 55, 104, 106, 

120, 124, 141, 143, 155, 157, 158, 

159. 194, 251, 257, 262 
Swanaton, 107 
Swanston, 311, 316, 318 
Swinburne, A. C., 43, 82, 198, 263- 

169 
Swinburne, Miss Isabel, 266 
Swindon. 123, 134. 135, 136, 137 
Swordy Well, 228, 235 
Symons, Arthur, 234 

Tarbolton, 291 

Tatham, Frederick, 15 

Taunton, 181 

Taylor, William, 245 

Teazel, 232 

Teignmouth, 35 

Temple, the, 19, 20, 24, 203 

Tenby, 45 

Tennyson, Alfred, 237, 239, 254- 

262 
Tennyson, Frederick, 236, 238 
Test, River, 124, 194 
Teviot, River, 301, 306 
Tewkesbury, 127 
Thames, River, 58, 69, 71, 75, 77, 

83, 84, 142, 164 
Thomson, George, 293 
Thomson, James. See "Seasons" 

and " Castle of Indolence " 
Thoreau, H. D,, 115, 155 
Thornhill, 94 
Thornton, 283 
Throckmorton, 204 
Thurtell, J., 245 
Thyme, 99 

Tillingbourne. River, 44 
Tintagel, 267 
Tintern, 198, 260, 277 
Tipper ary, 126 
Tobacco, 94, 95, 209 
Tobacco pipe-claj', 199 



INDEX 



329 



Tockenbam, 102 

Tolworth, 135, 140 

" Tom Jones," 127 

Topographers, 253 

Torquay, 257, 25S 

Tower, The, 19 

"Tramps, The Sunday," 44, 50 

Travelling, 39, 97, 121, 123, 146, 

153, 159, 188, 246, 281, 304 
Tremadoc, 62 
Trethinnick, 250 
Trevelyan, G. M., 49 
Tristram, 265, 267 
"Tristram Shandy," 112 
Trowbridge, 217, 218 
Trumpington, 256 
Tryermaine, 187, 283 
Tuileries, the, 130 
Tunbridge Wells, 141, 257 
Tweed, River, 298, 299, 301, 302, 

303. 304, 306 
Tyler, Wat, 14 
Tyndrum, 187 
Tytherleigh, 129 

Ullswater, 280 
Unwin, Mary, 204, 205, 207 
Upavon, 120 

Uphusband, 120, 123, 124 
Upton (on Severn), 127 
Urchfont, 97 

Valley of Stones or Rocks, 62, 276 

Varley, J., 14, 15 

Vauxhall, 113 

Venus, 46 

Violets, 72 

Vulliamy, Miss, 43 

Wales, 55, 58, 60. 92, 93, 97, 123, 
158, 159, 179, 248, 250, 257, 259, 
273, 298 

Walker, Sarah, 129 

Walking, 3, 44. 45, 48, 49r 50. 127, 
132, 181, 210. 293, 317 

Wallace, Alfred Russel, 190 

Walthamstow, 82, 84, 85 

Wansdyke, 99 

Wantage, 137 

Ware, 10, 20, 25, 26 

Warehanr; 148 

Warminster, 92, 100, 124 

Warninglid, 257 

Wastwater, 70 



Watchet, 184 

" Watchman, The," 181 

Watendlath, 80 

Watson, William, 191 

Watts-Dunton, T., 251, 267 

Waverley Abbey, 119 

Weald, The, 155, 157 

Webb, Philip, 82 

Wellingborough, 241 

Wells (Somerset), 197, 198 

Welsh, 245, 251, 259, 277 

Wem, 126, 127, 128 

Wessex, 144 et seq. 

Westbrook, Harriet, 58, 59, 63, 64 

West Country, 158, 187, 189, 195, 

197 
West End, 130 
Westminster, 38, 117, 128 
Westminster Abbey, 6, 8, 17 
Westminster School, 203 
Westmorland, 273 
Wey, River, 117 
Weybridge, 41 
Weyhill, 118, 124, 149 
Weymouth (Dorset), 149, 151, 204 
Weymouth (U.S.A.), 126 
Wheathampstead, 21, 29 
Wherstead, 236 
Whirlwind, 95 
White, Benjamin, iii 
White, Gilbert, 104-116, 195 
White Horse, Vale of, loi, 143 
White, John, iii, 112 
White, Sampson, 104 
Whittlesea, 244 
Wick, 315 
Widford, 20, 29 
Wight, Isle of, 32, 3i, 37, 99, 264, 

265 
Willenhall, 246 
Williams, A., 143 
Wilton, 100 
Wiltshire, 91, 92,93, 96, 97, 103, 106, 

123, 124, 135, 139, 140, 143, 194, 

196, 219. See also Wiltshire 

Names 
Wimbourne, 149 
Winchester, 37, 38, 69, 117, 197 
Winchmore, 28 
Windermere, 187, 259 
Windrush, River, 68 
Windsor JPark, 123 
Winterslow, 128, 129 
Wisbech, 127, 157, 225 



330 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND 



Wollstonecraft, Mary, g 

Wood, Anthony a, 91 

Woodbridge, 216, 236, 237 

Woodbury Hill, 148, 149 

Woodford, 76, 77 

Woodsorrel, 279 

Wookey Hole, 94 

Wootton Bassett, 94, 134, 137 

Worcester, 127 

World-strangeness, 191 

Worth Lodge, 120 

Wotton, 44, 70, 71 

Wren, Christopher, loi 

Wright, Thomas, 203 

Wye, River, 70, 198, 260, 273, 274, 277 



Wylye, River, 10 1 
Wythburn, 80 

Yardley, 241 

Yardley Chase, 203 

Yardley Oak, 208 

Yare, River, 245 

Yarmouth, 248, 252 

Yarrow, River, 274, 305, 309 

Yatton Keynell, 93, 94 

Yellowham Hill, 145, 130 

Yetholm, 251 

Yorkshire, 254, 257. 259, 273, 274, 

283 
Young, Edward, 10 



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